It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Tom Blyth, star of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, has landed a role alongside Mia McKenna-Bruce, Matt Dillon, and Isaach De Bankolé in The Cry of the Guards, the forthcoming drama from renowned French filmmaker Claire Denis (Stars at Noon). Based on Bernard-Marie Koltes’s play, Black Battles with Dogs, the story unfolds over the course of one night near a construction site in Senegal, where a group of workers is confronted by a man seeking justice for the cover-up of his brother’s murder at the site.
Colman Domingo is joining the cast of Gus Van Sant’s hostage thriller, Dead Man’s Wire. Austin Kolodney’s original screenplay is based on the story of Tony Kirtsis, who one frigid day in February 1977, took Indianapolis mortgage broker Dick Hall hostage in his office. He attached a steel wire that was hooked to a sawed-off, double barrel shotgun around his captive’s neck. (This "dead man's line" meant that if a policeman shot Kirtsis, the shotgun would go off and shoot Hall in the head.). Domingo joins previously announced cast members, Bill Skarsgård (Nosferatu) and Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things).
Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio may be set to make their seventh film together, as the director-actor duo are in talks to respectively direct and star in an adaptation of Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City for Disney’s 20th Century Studios. DiCaprio first acquired the rights to Larson’s bestselling book in 2010, with the project bouncing from studio to studio. It was last set up at Hulu as a big-budget miniseries in 2019 but was later dropped. First published in 2003, Devil in the White City follows H.H. Holmes, a notorious criminal regarded as the first American serial killer, for the lurid tabloid pieces published around his crimes. The story is set in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, and contrasts Holmes’s killings against the efforts of architect Daniel Burnham to make the World’s Fair a reality.
TELEVISION/STREAMING
Minnie Driver, Ruth Jones, and James Nesbitt are set to star in Run Away, Harlan Coben's next Netflix series. The story centers on Simon Greene (Nesbitt), who had the perfect life with a loving wife (Driver) and kids, great job, and beautiful home. But everything fell apart when his eldest daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange) ran away. Simon's search to find her will take him into a dangerous underworld, revealing deep secrets that could tear his family apart forever. In keeping with previous Coben adaptations Fool Me Once and Missing You, Run Away will relocate the story from the U.S. to the U.K. Filming will begin around Manchester and the North West of England this month.
Netflix has greenlit a fourth season of its popular legal drama series, The Lincoln Lawyer, with production set to begin next month. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo will return as Mickey Haller in Season 4, based on the sixth book in The Lincoln Lawyer series by Michael Connelly, The Law of Innocence. Also coming back are Becki Newton (Lorna), Jazz Raycole (Izzy), and Angus Sampson (Cisco), as well as Neve Campbell (Maggie McPherson). Created for television by David E. Kelley and developed for television by Ted Humphrey, the drama follows Mickey Haller (Garcia-Rulfo), an iconoclastic idealist who runs his law practice out of the back seat of his Lincoln as he takes on cases big and small across Los Angeles.
Rhona Mitra has landed the female lead opposite Joel Kinnaman in Debriefing the President (wt), the four-hour miniseries for TNT, which comes as part of the network’s renewed focus on premium event programming. Mitra plays Polly Stevens, a colleague of Kinnaman’s real-life CIA analyst, John Nixon, whose book of the same name inspired the series. Delving into the 2003 interrogation of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Debriefing the President explores a CIA analyst’s relentless search for truth, the complexities of justice on the global stage, and the deeply personal father-son connections woven into a turbulent period of history.
As Deadline noted, it was probably inevitable the worlds of FBI and CIA would eventually collide on a TV show from Dick Wolf, the king of crime procedurals. The result is FBI: CIA, a spinoff from Wolf's hit CBS drama FBI, which is targeting a potential series order for the 2025-2026 season. The proposed offshoot follows a dedicated, strait-laced FBI agent and a street-smart CIA agent who are part of a new, clandestine taskforce charged with solving and preventing domestic terrorism in and around New York City. Three characters, including the FBI and CIA agent leads, will appear in the spinoff episode airing this spring and would become series regulars should the project go forward. Casting is currently underway for the roles.
Uma Thurman (Kill Bill; Pulp Fiction) has been cast as a series regular opposite Michael C. Hall in the new Showtime original series, Dexter: Resurrection. Thurman will play Charley, who works as the head of security for mysterious billionaire Leon Prater. She worked as a Special Ops officer and in the world of private security before becoming the right-hand woman for Prater. Hall is set to reprise the titular role of Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter expert who doesn’t just solve murders but also commits them. The actor played Dexter for eight seasons during the show’s original run from 2006-13, followed by Dexter: New Blood in 2021, and he currently narrates origin story, Dexter: Original Sin.
Melissa Joan Hart is set to continue her long-standing partnership with Lifetime in the upcoming thriller, Killing the Competition. Debuting March 1st, the film is inspired by actual events of an overbearing mother (Hart), once her high school's star dancer and prom queen, who descends from meddling to menacing after her daughter is cut from the dance team of her own high school alma mater. In a desperate attempt to reclaim what she believes is rightfully theirs, she becomes involved in a shocking kidnapping plot. Lily Brooks O'Briant, Valerie Loo, Anzu Lawson, and Eddie Mills also star.
Fans of the ITV drama McDonald & Dodds were upset to learn it has been cancelled after four seasons. McDonald & Dodds, which debuted its first season in March 2020, followed Jason Watkins and Tala Gouveia's titular characters of DS Dodds and DCI Lauren McDonald as they solved crimes in Bath. Other regular cast members include Outnumbered's Claire Skinner and EastEnders's Charlie Chambers as Chief Superintendent Mary Ormond and DC Samuel Goldie. While fans won't be seeing Watkins back in the role of DS Dodds, it was recently announced he has been cast in a new detective drama from Death in Paradise boss, Toby Frow.
PODCASTS/RADIO
Authors on the Air spoke with Robert Crais about the twentieth novel in the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series, The Big Empty.
Cops and Writers had the first of a special two-part show with Kansas City Police Detective Brent Cartwright, who dedicated over 25 years to serving as a US Army veteran and police officer, spending more than a decade as an undercover detective. His book, Undercover Junkie: Chasing Highs, Confronting Killers, and Unraveling in the Chaos, is due out February 15, 2025.
The latest Crime Time FM featured "The Review Show January 2025," with a look at the latest round up of new releases in the world of crime fiction.
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