Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Matthew McConaughey all but confirmed a sequel to The Lincoln Lawyer, and hopes to reprise his role as attorney Mickey Haller. The film would combine two of Michael Connelly's novels and see Bryan Cranston's character play "a significantly larger role," according to DigitalSpy.

Peter Craig (co-writer for The Town) has been tapped to pen the screenplay for The Ghostman. The story centers on a man whose job it is to clean up problems and assist fugitives in disappearing. Then, he's dragged into a casino heist gone bad and only two days to fix the situation before a ruthless kingpin kills the "ghostman's" mentor.

Kenneth Branagh is not only directing the Jack Ryan movie reboot starring Chris Pine, he's in talks to star in the film playing villain Viktor Stazov, who creates a plot to destroy the US economy with the help of the Russian government.

The cast for the gangster movie Malavita has expanded to include Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tommy Lee Jones, Dianna Agron and John D'Leo. The comic drama follows a group of gangsters who are relocated to France under witness protection.

TV

The Emmy nominees for excellence in U.S. television programming were announced last week. The contenders for Best Drama Series include Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Homeland and Mad Men. Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia was nominated for Outstanding Miniseries or Movie and both Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were nominated for that episode, as well. Omnimystery News highlighted the nominees from the crime dramas.

Production begins next week on the first French production of a television crime drama filmed entirely in English. The project, titled Jo, will be an eight-episode series featuring Jean Reno as police detective Joachim "Jo" Legrand, with each episode centering on a different iconic Paris landmark as Jo investigates mysterious murder cases. Edgar Award-winning screenwriter René Balcer created the series for Atlantique Production. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

The series Unforgettable may have gotten a reprieve, with CBS first axing and then renewing the cop procedural, but three of its stars apparently aren't so lucky. Cast members Michael Gaston (Det. Mike Costello), Kevin Rankin (Det. Roe Saunders) and Daya Vaidya (Det. Nina Inara) will not return as series regulars when the show returns in in summer 2013.

Star Trek writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are pitching a TV show based on the classic supernatural story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by 19th-century author Washington Irving. The series would be set in the modern day, with Ichabod Crane partnering with Sleepy Hollow's female sheriff to solve mysterious happenings in town. Meanwhile, a competing project also based on the Sleepy Hollow story is being pitched to the CW network by Missing writers Grant Scharbo and Patrick Macmanus.
 
Former Criminal Minds star Paget Brewster will star in the upcoming season 14 opener of Law & Order: SVU. She'll play the head of the Public Integrity Unit at the District Attorney's office, dealing with the case against Captain Cragen (Dann Florek) under suspicion of murder after he woke up by the side of a dead woman in last season's finale. Several former SVU guest stars will also return for the episode.

PODCASTS

NPR's summer Crime in the City feature kicks off with author Bruce DeSilva, who says Providence, Rhode Island is the perfect place to set his crime fiction.

NPR also featured a rebroadcast of a 2007 interview with author Michael Connelly, as he takes a reporter on a tour of Los Angeles sites where he sets his Harry Bosch series.