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:

WILDFIRE UPDATE

Due to the recent wildfires in the greater Los Angeles area, production on some TV shows and movies has been put on hold temporarily. Affected shows include NCIS, NCIS: Origins, and The Rookie, among others. The LA County Fire Department announced that all permits issued for filming in the communities of Altadena, La Crescenta, La Canada, Flintridge, and unincorporated Pasadena had been withdrawn, with other permit revocations possible. Though most studio sites or soundstages are not directly in the path of the various fires, the air quality has been deemed dangerous to health, and residents are being asked not to leave their homes unnecessarily. Of course, Hollywood is not the only entity affected, as many other businesses, schools, churches, animal shelters, and homes have been destroyed. If you'd like to help victims of the fires, CBS compiled a helpful list of resources.

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Tom Holland is set to star in and produce The Partner, a drama based on the John Grisham 1997 bestseller that Graham Moore (The Imitation Game) is scripting for Universal. The story follows Patrick Lanigan, a young partner in a white shoe Biloxi law firm who fakes his own death in a burning car. He’s left behind a wife, newborn daughter, and a secret—he’s actually faked his death to create a new life by stealing $90 million from a client of his crooked law firm, and ultimately finds happiness and love in South America. When the client who worked so hard to defraud the government finds the money is missing from his offshore accounts, he becomes determined to hunt down the lawyer he doesn’t believe is dead. That leads the attorney to have to turn himself in to the FBI and face up to the wife, child, and life he left behind.

Ali Afshar’s ESX Entertainment is developing the western, Day of Reckoning, starring Billy Zane, Zach Roerig, and Cara Jade Myers, and directed by Shaun Silva. The project centers on put-upon lawman John Dorsey (Roerig), on the verge of losing his wife and his job as sheriff, who sets up a posse with bullish U.S. Marshall Butch Hayden (Zane) to hold outlaw Emily Rouse (Myers) hostage. A battle of wills ensues as Emily turns the posse on themselves, but as her marauding husband and his gang approach, Emily and John realize they will need each other to survive.


TELEVISION/STREAMING

Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer is set to lead the thriller series, Minotaur, alongside Assaad Bouab (Call My Agent). Celyn Jones will write and direct the six-part Welsh/French drama, which he created and will be produced via Mad As Birds, the production company he runs with Sean Marley. Minotaur follows Luc (Bouab), a cold-blooded killer who escapes Paris’s criminal underbelly for the more prosaic North Wales. There he meets Angel (Dormer) who lives in a struggling community she feels she can never belong to, raising her son Joe alone. Whilst fighting addiction, Angel gravitates towards the mysterious Luc as a new start for both, but the past looks determined to drag Luc back into a dangerous underworld.

In the wake of the success of Polish drama, Śleboda, which has become SkyShowtime’s best performing scripted series ever in the country, the streamer is rolling out the series across its footprint — meaning its services in Northern Europe, Iberia, and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, starting February 20. Śleboda is an adaptation of the first installment of the acclaimed crime novels by Małgorzata Fugiel-Kuźmińska and Michał Kuźmiński, and turns on the story of cultural anthropologist Anka Serafin, played by Maria Dębska. She embarks on a journey of self-discovery in the mountains but stumbles upon a dead body and becomes embroiled in a twisty murder mystery. She crosses paths with shameless journalist Sebastian Strzygoń (Maciej Musiał), and Jędrek Chowaniec (Piotr Pacek), a local police officer, with whom she once had a teen romance.

David Zayas (Dexter), Jack Alcott (Dexter: New Blood), and James Remar (Oppenheimer) will join Michael C. Hall in the Paramount+/Showtime Original series, Dexter: Resurrection in series regular roles. Production begins on the new series this month and will premiere in the summer. Zayas and Remar will return to the roles they made famous in the mothership series, Detective Angel Batista and Harry Morgan, Dexter’s fathery. Alcott will play Dexter’s son, Harrison Morgan, who he originally portrayed in Dexter: New Blood. As Deadline noted, how Remar will return on a series regular basis will be interesting to see considering his character has been dead for quite some time. No official synopsis for Dexter: Resurrection has been revealed, but it will be a follow-up to Dexter: New Blood and set in the present day.

A new trailer was released for Season 3 of Reacher, based on the novels of Lee Child. The trailer starts with Reacher (Alan Ritchson) being recruited for another mission, this time one involving the owner of a rug import business and the DEA. But this mission has a wrinkle: Quinn (Brian Tee), a former military officer who committed a horrific crime, is involved.

PODCASTS/RADIO

On Crime Time FM, Wes Browne chatted with Scott Blackburn and Paul Burke about his noir, They All Fall the Same; why it wasn't called Spoon; the Appalachians; North Carolina; pizza; and community.

Authors on the Air interviewed Edgar nominee, Alafair Burke, about her new twisty, layered novel, The Note.

Cops and Writers welcomed Richard Rybicki, a retired Chicago Police Department detective and teacher of Crime Scene Technology, who turned to his lifelong passion of writing with a series featuring Sam Laska, a disgraced former Chicago Police detective living in Florida.

On Read or Dead, Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester discussed their most anticipated thriller and mystery books of 2025.