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

Sidney Flanigan (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) has signed on to star opposite Sofia Yepes in The Low End Theory, an indie thriller based on Yepes’s script, which she co-wrote with director Francisco Ordoñez. Billed as a film noir set in the Latinx and LGBTQ+ world of Los Angeles, The Low End Theory centers on Raquel (Yepes), an aspiring beats producer in the low-budget hip-hop world moonlighting as a drug money launderer, who ends up stealing from her crime-lord boss to pay off debts owed by the woman with whom she is having an obsessive affair. Flanigan plays Raquel’s troubled lover, Veronica.

Saban Films has acquired the U.S. rights to Knox Goes Away, a film directed by and starring, Michael Keaton. Al Pacino, James Marsden, Marcia Gay Harden, Suzy Nakamura, John Hoogenakker, Joanna Kulig, Ray McKinnon, and Lela Loren also star. Knox Goes Away, written by Gregory Poirier, premiered earlier this year at the Toronto International Film Festival and, according to the official synopsis, "follows John Knox (Keaton), a contract killer with a rapidly evolving form of dementia, who is offered the opportunity to redeem himself by saving the life of the adult son from whom he had been estranged." Saban is targeting a 2024 first quarter release.

Quiver Distribution has picked up North American rights to the action thriller, Wanted Man, co-written, directed by and starring Dolph Lundgren, for release in select theaters and on VOD on January 19, 2024. Also starring Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and Christina Villa (The Wedding in the Hamptons), the film centers on Johansen (Lundgren), an aging detective whose outdated policing methods have given the department a recent public relations problem. To save his job, he is sent to Mexico to extradite a female witness (Villa) to the murders of two DEA agents. Once there, he finds not only his old opinions challenged, but that bad guys on both sides of the border are now gunning for him and his witness.

TELEVISION/SMALL SCREEN

MarVista Entertainment, the Fox-owned studio, is turning Seraphina Nova Glass's thriller novel, On A Quiet Street, into a television series. Set in an exclusive Oregon coast community, the story follows two female best friends, Paige and Cora. Cora thinks her husband, Finn, is cheating – she just needs to catch him in the act. That’s where Paige comes in. Paige lost her son to a hit-and-run accident last year, and she’s drowning in the kind of grief that makes people do reckless things like spying on the locals, searching for proof her son’s death was no accident…and agreeing to Cora’s plan to reveal what kind of man Finn really is. All the while, their reclusive new neighbor, Georgia, is acting stranger and stranger every day. But what could such a lovely young mother possibly be hiding?

Amazon’s Prime Video has renewed Reacher for a third run ahead of the debut of season 2 on December 15. Alan Ritchson, who plays the title character, revealed the news from the set of season 3 during a panel at CCXP in São Paulo, Brazil. He also debuted an extended trailer for the second season. The series is based on Lee Child’s novels with the second season based on the 11th book in the series, Bad Luck and Trouble.

The BBC ordered a second season of the heist drama, Gold, based on the infamous real-life events of the Brink’s-Mat robbery and the decades-long chain of events that followed. First-season cast members Hugh Bonneville, Charlotte Spencer, Emun Elliott, Tom Cullen, Stefanie Martini, and Sam Spruell are confirmed for season 2. The season 2 plot will follow what happened to the half of the Brinks-Mat gold stolen in the daring 1983 raid, after police realize those they convicted didn’t have all of it.

Kelli Giddish‘s former Detective Amanda Rollins will return for the Season 25 premiere of Law & Order: SVU. Giddish exited the series midway through Season 24 and last appeared in a guest-starring role in the Season 24 finale, which was part of a three-way crossover among Law & Order, SVU and Organized Crime. In that episode, Giddish’s character Rollins married ADA Sonny Carisi Jr (Peter Scanavino) and revealed she was on a new career path and had accepted a teaching job at Fordham University.

Found and The Irrational have been renewed for second seasons at NBC, the network announced this past week. In Found, Shanola Hampton stars as PR specialist Gabi Mosely, whose crisis management team is determined to share the stories of the hundreds of thousands of people of color who go missing each year in the U.S. The Irrational is based on Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational, and stars Jesse L. Martin as prolific behavioral science professor Alec Mercer, whose unique expertise lends itself to high-stakes cases across governments, law enforcement and corporations.

Andrew Koji (Warrior), Richard Dormer (Game of Thrones), and T’Nia Miller (Fall of the House of Usher) have boarded the upcoming third season of Gangs of London, joining fellow actors, Phil Daniels and Ruth Sheen. Created by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery, the Sky and AMC+ series follows the struggles between rival gangs and other criminal organizations in present-day London. Koji will play an unnamed assassin at the heart of the unfolding mystery; Dormer will play Cornelius Quinn, a face from the past whose arrival awakens old rivalries; and Miller takes on the role of the formidable new Mayor of London set to wreak havoc for the gangs. Season 3 kicks off with ex-undercover cop Elliot Carter, played by Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísu, now operating as a top-level criminal alongside the Dumanis, but their business is thrown into chaos when their shipment of cocaine is spiked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilians all over London.

The first trailer for the Apple TV+ series Criminal Record has been released. Criminal Record will premiere the first two episodes on January 10 followed by new episodes dropping weekly, every Wednesday through February 21. The new eight-episode, one-hour crime thriller stars Peter Capaldi (Dr. Who) and Cush Jumbo (The Good Wife) as detectives in a tug-of-war over a historic murder conviction.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

Dateline NBC is set to launch its 15th original podcast Mortal Sin, to be reported by Dateline correspondent Josh Mankiewicz. The first two episodes will be available for download and streaming for free across podcast platforms on December 5; the remaining three will drop over the following two weeks. Mortal Sin investigates how the death of a pastor’s wife after a house fire uncovers a web of sex, murder, and deception.

On Read or Dead, Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester discussed mystery books for Native American Heritage Month.

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up, the first of three Christmas episodes over the next few weeks, this one featuring the mystery short story "Christmas Cookie Caper" written by Margaret S. Hamilton and read by actor Donna Beavers.

The latest episode of the Crime Cafe featured Debbi Mack's interview with crime writer Liz Alterman about her new thriller novel, The Perfect Neighborhood.

On Crime Time FM, Paul Burke reviewed a selection of November crime fiction releases, including author elevator pitches from CL Pattison, Jane Jesmond, Alexandra Benedict, Paul Durston, and Stephen Ronson.

The latest Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine podcast featured "The Green Man" by James G. Tipton, a mystery story with Sherlock Holmes's friend and confidant Dr. John H. Watson. This time around, Dr. Watson travels to coal-mining country in northern Wales to investigate corrupt railroad barons.

On the most recent Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine podcast, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, nominated for Shamus, Derringer, and ITW Thriller awards, read his story, "Home for the Holidays," a Christmastime thriller from the Jan/Feb 2020 issue.

Pick Your Poison featured a poison that causes blindness, which is also why some prison commissaries don’t stock fruit, and how toxins were intentionally used to adulterate alcohol during Prohibition.