Media Murder for Monday

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

Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. rights to the dramatic thriller, 892. The film stars John Boyega and the late Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire) and marks the feature directorial debut of Abi Damaris Corbin. The film recently made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast. Based on a true story, it picks up with former U.S. Marine Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) as his disability check from Veterans Affairs fails to materialize, leaving him on the brink of poverty. Desperate and with no other options, he walks into a Wells Fargo Bank and says he has a bomb. "What ensues is an edge-of-your-seat narrative that reminds us of the social responsibility we have to our soldiers, our colleagues, our families as well as to strangers."

Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, Yellowstone star Cole Hauser, and Blindspot actress Jaimie Alexander are set to star in the thriller, The Minute You Wake Up Dead, currently filming in Mississippi. The film follows a stockbroker (Hauser) in a small southern town who gets embroiled in an insurance scam with a next-door neighbor (Alexander) that leads to multiple murders when a host of other people want in on the plot. Sheriff Thurmond Fowler (Freeman), the by-the-book town sheriff for over four decades, works earnestly to try to unravel the town’s mystery and winds up getting more than he bargained for.

Jamie Dornan is set to join Gal Gadot in the international spy thriller, Heart of Stone, from Netflix and Skydance. Plot details are being kept under wraps, although it's said it's possibly being set up as an action franchise in the vein of the Mission: Impossible series. The Old Guard writer, Greg Rucka, penned the screenplay with Allison Schroeder. Tom Harper, known for The Aeronauts and Wild Rose, is set to direct.

Actor-producer Noree Victoria (Queen Sugar; American Crime Story) is making her feature directorial debut with An Arrangement, a psychological thriller marking the first produced film from TV writer, Helen Shang (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings Of Power; Hannibal). The indie, currently shooting in Northern California, follows a politician’s wife whose drug addiction threatens to derail her husband’s gubernatorial campaign. Tensions rise when she is forced to secretly undergo rehab at the couple’s secluded summer home, and her husband’s interest in their unconventional nurse puts the couple’s marriage—and all of their lives—on the line.

Ryan Phillippe, Kat Graham, and Jim Gaffigan are starring in the thriller, Collide. The film, written and directed by Mukunda Michael Dewil (Retribution) is billed as is "an edge-of-your-seat, noirish thriller" where three interlocking stories hurtle towards an explosive end. It follows an ensemble of characters whose paths intersect over the course of a single evening inside an L.A. restaurant. Rounding out the cast are David Cade, Dylan Flashner, Drea de Matteo, Aisha Dee, David James Elliot, and Paul Ben-Victor.

Quintessa Swindell has been tapped to lead the cast of Paul Schrader’s next film, Master Gardener, alongside the previously announced Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton. Also joining the cast of Schrader’s crime thriller is Esai Morales. The film, being shot in Louisiana, stars Edgerton as Narvel Roth, the master gardener of an American estate who is forced to confront his dark past when he meets Maya (played by Swindell). Morales will star as Roth’s witness protection officer.

Nina Dobrev has joined Aaron Eckhart in the action-thriller, The Bricklayer, which will start production next month in Europe. Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 filmmaker, Renny Harlin, is directing the movie, which The Expendables outfit Millennium Media is producing with Gerard Butler after both teamed up with Eckhart on the lucrative Has Fallen franchise. The plot is set in motion when someone blackmails the CIA by assassinating foreign journalists and making it look like the agency is responsible. As the world begins to unite against the U.S., the CIA must lure its most brilliant—and rebellious—operative out of retirement, forcing him to confront his checkered past while unraveling an international conspiracy.

Boies Schiller Entertainment snagged film rights to the real-life story of Abdullahi Tumburkai, a farmer in Nigeria who was in a desperate race to save the lives of his two brothers and successfully negotiated their freedom from kidnappers. Kidnapping has become a cottage industry in regions of Nigeria amid poverty and the inability to make a living in the farming region of Kaduna. After getting his brothers back—he'd sold his farm and paid around $13,000 to free them after 33 days—he became the neighborhood go-to guy for others desperate to recover kidnapped love ones.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Scott Turow’s best-selling novel, Presumed Innocent, is becoming a limited series on Apple TV+. Veteran writer David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) will serve as showrunner and executive producer alongside Dustin Thomason, J.J. Abrams, and Ben Stephenson. Presumed Innocent is described as "the story of a horrific murder that upends the Chicago Prosecuting Attorneys’ office when one of its own is suspected of the crime." The novel was previously made into a hit film in 1990 with Harrison Ford in the lead role. There was also a 1992 TV miniseries spinoff, The Burden of Proof, and a TV movie sequel in 2011 titled Innocent. Kelley plans to reimagine Presumed Innocent to explore "obsession, sex, politics, and the power and limits of love, as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together."

ABC has given a cast-contingent pilot order to Will Trent, a crime drama based on Karin Slaughter’s bestselling book series. The books center on Special Agent Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, who was abandoned at birth and endured a harsh coming of age in Atlanta’s overwhelmed foster care system. But now, determined to use his unique point of view to make sure no one feels as abandoned as he was, Trent has the highest clearance rate in the GBI.

CBS has made its first order of the 2022 pilot season. The network has handed a pilot pickup to a mother-and-son legal drama from Scott Prendergast, who wrote on FX’s Wilfred and appeared in HBO’s Silicon Valley, and Dr. Phil McGraw. The untitled drama follows a talented-but-directionless P.I. who is the black sheep of his family. Despite their opposing personalities, he agrees to work as the in-house investigator for his overbearing mother, a successful attorney reeling from the recent dissolution of her marriage.

Paramount+ has given out more details of its upcoming spy series starring Kiefer Sutherland. The streamer revealed that the eight-part series is titled Rabbit Hole and centers on private espionage operative, James Weir (Sutherland), who finds himself in the midst of a battle over the preservation of democracy in a world at odds with misinformation, behavioral manipulation, the surveillance state, and the interests that control these extraordinary powers.

Marg Helgenberger is eyeing a possible return to the CSI franchise with a reprisal of her role as Catherine Willows. Helgenberg would appear in the upcoming second season of CSI: Vegas, the sequel to the groundbreaking 2000 series, in which Helgenberger starred for the first 12 seasons. Season 1 opened with an existential threat that could bring down the entire Crime Lab and release thousands of convicted killers back onto the neon-lit streets of Vegas. A brilliant new team of investigators led by Maxine Roby (Paula Newsome) enlisted the help of old friends, Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox), to investigate a case centered around former colleague, David Hodges (Wallace Langham).

AMC is moving forward with its series adaptation of Invitation to a Bonfire. Based on the novel by Adrienne Celt, Invitation to a Bonfire is a psychological thriller set in the 1930s at an all-girls boarding school in New Jersey. Inspired by Vladimir and Vera Nabokov’s co-dependent marriage, the series follows Zoya, a young Russian immigrant and groundskeeper, who is drawn into a lethal love triangle with the school’s newest faculty member—an enigmatic novelist—and his bewitching wife.

NBC has picked up two pilot projects including Dean Georgaris’s agent drama, The Blank Slate, and The Irrational (Arika Mittman’s adaptation of Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational). Blank Slate is a high-concept procedural about a government agent who may not be what he seems. Special Agent Alexander McCoy is a legend in law enforcement, the agent we all hope is out there, the agent we’d all like to be. The only issue is … he doesn’t actually exist. He’s a ghost, a phantom. So what happens when a man claiming to be Alexander McCoy walks through the door with all of his skills and knowledge, but with an agenda nobody will see coming? The other pilot pickup, The Irrational, is an investigative thriller that follows a world-renowned professor of behavioral science, who lends his expertise to an array of high-stakes cases involving governments, law enforcement, and corporations with his unique and unexpected approach to understanding human behavior.

Denis Leary is joining the Law & Order: Organized Crime family in a recurring role. The actor is set to play Frank Donnelly of the NYPD. His character will interact with Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), with Leary’s debut episode airing March 3. The Leary casting comes a little over a week after the news that Dylan McDermott is leaving Organized Crime (where he played baddie/mob boss Richard Wheatley) and heading to another Dick Wolf series, FBI: Most Wanted on CBS, as Julian McMahon exits that program March 17.

The David Boreanaz-led SEAL Team will be back for another go-round on Paramount+ after the streamer renewed the military drama series for a 10-episode sixth season. SEAL Team is a military drama that follows the professional and personal lives of the most elite unit of Navy SEALs as they train, plan, and execute the most dangerous, high-stakes missions our country can ask of them.

ABC’s drama pilot, L.A. Law, a revival of the Steven Bochco legal drama, expanded its cast with the addition of John Harlan Kim. He joins original cast members Blair Underwood and Corbin Bernsen, who are reprising their respective roles as Johnathan Rollins and Arnie Becker. He also joins Toks Olagundoye, Hari Nef and Ian Duff, who will play new characters in the revival. In the pilot, written by Marc Guggenheim and Ubah Mohamed and to be directed by Anthony Hemingway, the venerable law firm of McKenzie Brackman—now named Becker Rollins—reinvents itself as a litigation firm specializing in only the most high-profile, boundary-pushing and incendiary cases. Kim joins L.A. Law as Chad Park, an up-and-coming attorney at the firm described as a "shark-in-training" whose ambition sometimes gets ahead of his ethical standards.

Athena Pictures, Starlings Television, and Propagate Content’s Ben Silverman will co-produce Shadowland, a female-driven wildlife crime thriller series based on real events. The series follow two wildlife crime operatives, both former U.S. special operations counter-terrorism specialists with decades of combined experience working in some of the most dangerous places in the world, now dedicated to uncovering the real drivers behind Africa’s wildlife crime crisis. The duo uncover a plot to ambush a rhino translocation caravan and expose a massive web of corruption, taking it apart piece by piece.

Jennifer Beals is set to recur on NBC’s Law & Order: Organized Crime. She will play the wife of a new antagonist that was introduced on the NBC series this season, Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson), a drug kingpin in New York and the head of the Marcy Corporation. Seals is boarding the Dick Wolf series as another big-name recurring player, Dylan McDermott, will be wrapping his arc to take on the lead of another Wolf drama, FBI: Most Wanted. This marks Beals’s return to the Law & Order franchise; she did a guest-starring turn on the mothership series in 2007. Law & Order: Organized Crime brought SVU's Elliot Stabler character (played by Christopher Meloni) back to the fold as the head of the NYPD organized crime unit.

Almost a year after the Criminal Minds revival for Paramount+ was announced, six fan favorite cast members, Joe Mantegna, Kirsten Vangsness, Adam Rodriguez, A.J. Cook, Aisha Tyler, and Paget Brewster, have agreed to come back, subject to closing their deals and availability. Deadline also reported that a license agreement for a 10-episode new season of Criminal Minds has been reached between Paramount+ and the studios behind the crime drama, ABC Signature and CBS Studios.

The six-episode series, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, premieres Friday, March 11 on Apple TV+. The streamer unveiled a trailer for the series, which is based on the novel of the same name by Walter Mosley, and follows the title character, a dementia-ridden 90-plus-year-old man who agrees to an experimental medical treatment to regain all his memories. But the effect is only temporary, and he’s now in a race against time to solve the murder of his nephew before his restored memory fades.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

The latest episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features Debbi Mack's interview with Jennifer Graeser Dornbush, screenwriter, author, speaker, and forensic specialist. Along with her crime fiction, she's published a book on forensics called Forensic Speak: How to Write Realistic Crime Dramas.

Wrong Place, Write Crime welcomed Scotti Andrews to talk about her mysteries, horror, and romance offerings.

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast episode is up featuring the mystery short story, "A Virtuous Thief," written by JR Lindermuth and read by actor Sean Hopper.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine podcast featured poet and author, Anna Scotti, who's been contributing a series to EQMM featuring a sleuth in the Witness Security program. Scotti reads her story “What the Morning Never Suspected,” the second in her WITSEC series, from the September/October 2020 issue.

My Favorite Detective Stories host, John Hoda, chatted with Sybil Johnson about her short crime fiction and Aurora Anderson Mystery Series.

The 200th episode of It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club featured snippets from some of the podcast's favorite interviews from the past.

Crime Time FM spoke with Tim Lucas, one of the pioneers of serious genre film criticism, now in his 50th year as a published writer. He’s an award-winning biographer, magazine founder/editor, and novelist (the cult classic Throat Sprockets).

The Red Hot Chili Writers chatted with Dean Koontz about his new novel, Quicksilver; discussed dogs in literature; found out what a dude ranch is; and host, Abir Mukherjee, took on Dean in a canine-inspired quiz.