Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Oscar winner Jared Leto has signed on to star in Martin Zandvliet’s action-thriller The Outsider for Waypoint Entertainment and Linson Entertainment. Written by Andrew Baldwin, The Outsider is set in post-WWII Japan and follows an imprisoned American soldier (Leto) who is released with the help of his Yakuza cellmate. Now free, he sets out to earn their respect and repay his debt while navigating the dangerous criminal underworld.  

TELEVISION

Producer Dick Wolf is planning the next Law & Order franchise as an anthology drama, taking on a different true crime case in each season. The first season will be fully focused on brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, who gained notoriety in 1990 after murdering their parents Jose and Kitty in cold blood months before.  

Not to be outdone with the true-crime craze, CBS is looking for its own Making a Murderer/American Crime Story. A day after NBC greenlighted Dick Wolf's Law & Order true-crime scripted anthology, CBS is in final negotiations for an untitled unscripted anthology focusing on a different case each season with the first focusing on the JonBenet Ramsey murder case.

Fox renewed the supernatural procedural Lucifer starring Tom Ellis as the devil who tires of life in Hell and materializes in the City of Angels, where he aids the LAPD in rounding up and punishing evildoers. The network also ordered a second season of Rosewood, starring Morris Chestnut as Dr. Beaumont Rosewood Jr., a private pathologist working in Miami, Florida, in high demand with law enforcement.

As NCIS gets ready to say goodbye to Michael Weatherly, a.k.a. Very Special Agent Tony DiNozzo, news comes that British actor Duane Henry (The Dark Knight Rises) has been hired for two episodes in Season 13 to play MI-6 Officer Clayton Reeves, a man known for "swagger, confidence and humor."

Brad Garrett will guest-star in Law & Order: SVU's two-part season finale playing Gary Munson, a corrections officer at Rikers who maintains his reputation as a hard-working family man, but hides a long history of corruption and violence against female inmates, both in and out of the prison.

NBC’s Friday night supernatural crime drama Grimm has received another early renewal by the network for a sixth season. The series centers on Detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) and also stars Russell Hornsby, Bitsie Tulloch, Silas Weir Mitchell, Reggie Lee, Bree Turner and Sasha Roiz.

David Simons's upcoming HBO drama The Deuce has tapped novelists Megan Abbott and Lisa Lutz as new writers on the series, joining current writers George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Simon, who together penned the pilot. The project, which was given a series order in January, stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Franco and follows the story of the legalization and subsequent rise of the porn industry in New York’s Times Square from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s.

Content Television has sold upcoming BBC drama The Secret Agent to RLJ Entertainment’s Acorn in the U.S. The four-part period series is due to air on BBC One later this year and will stream in the U.S via Acorn TV. The Secret Agent is the adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel of terrorism, espionage and betrayal, with BAFTA-winning writer Tony Marchant (Great Expectations) penning the adaptation and Toby Jones, Vicky McClure, Ian Hart and Stephen Graham set to star.

The Blacklist co-star Ryan Eggold has closed a deal to play the male lead opposite Famke Janssen in NBC’s proposed spinoff from the thriller drama series, reprising his role as covert operative Tom Keen aka Jacob Phelps. The spinoff focuses on the relationship between Susan "Scottie" Halsted (Janssen) and Tom (Eggold), which is said to be similar to the one between Raymond "Red" Reddington (James Spader) and Liz (Megan Boone) on the original series, with Scottie as Tom’s handler.

The BBC and Mark Gatiss revealed Wednesday that shooting for the fourth series/season of Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman has officially begun. A statement from co-creators, writers and executive producers Gatiss and Steven Moffat gave a few more clues about what to expect: "Ghosts of the past are rising in the lives of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson bringing adventure, romance and terror in their wake. This is the story we’ve been telling from the beginning. A story about to reach its climax...”

Ray Donovan, starring Liev Schreiber as a Hollywood fixer in the Showtime series, received its Season 4 premiere date of June 26 and also a first-look trailer.

Finally, The Telegraph noted that "badass female detectives are finally taking over from middle-aged white men on TV."

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The latest Crime and Science Radio podcast featured an interview with Chief Scott LaChasse of the Burbank Police Department

Authors on the Air welcomed Brian Freeman, the international bestselling author of psychological suspense novels, in conversation with Libby Hellmann.