TV News Roundup: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s New Series, Julie Andrews in Shondaland & More
All Your Must-Know Wednesday TV News:
Game of Thrones Star Plans TV Return
On Wednesday, FX announced the cast of the upcoming pilot Gone Hollywood, set in 1980. The drama series would follow a group of talent agents who defect from an old-guard percentery to create their own. Its success disrupts the business and changes movies forever. It will feature a mix of fictional protagonists and real-life entertainment figures and events.
The pilot will star John Magaro as Eli Zeller, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jack DeVoe, Lola Kirke as Abbie Jinks, Ben Schnetzer as Robbie Riese, Jonathan Pryce as Benny Landau, and Judd Hirsch as Lev Kertzman. Set to recur are Nelson Franklin, Eric Lange, Sarah Ramos, Peta Sergeant, and Jeremy Shamos.
Ted Griffin wrote and will direct the pilot as well as serve as an executive producer and showrunner. Eli Bush, Garrett Basch, Shawn Ryan, and Marney Hochman are also set as executive producers.
Mary Poppins Becomes a Gossip Writer
Netflix announced that Julie Andrews will voice Lady Whistledown, described as a mysterious, sharp-tongued gossip writer anonymous to readers, in Shondaland’s upcoming untitled Bridgerton series. Her mix of social commentary and scathing insult causes a frenzy in 1813.
The series is based on Julia Quinn’s best-selling Bridgerton novels set in the sexy, lavish, and competitive world of Regency London high society. Its world is “a seductive, sumptuous” one “with intricate rules and dramatic power struggles.” The eight close-knit siblings of the Bridgerton family “must navigate the upper ten thousand’s marriage mart in search of romance, adventure, and love.”
The eight one-hour episodes will be released in 2020. Chris Van Dusen will serve as creator and executive producer. Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers will also executive produce.
Katee Sackhoff Is on Another Mission in July
The Battlestar Galactica star’s new series, Another Life, will drop on Netflix on Thursday, July 25.
Sackhoff plays astronaut Niko Breckinridge, who is searching for alien intelligence and leads a crew that faces unimaginable danger on what might be a one-way mission to explore the genesis of an alien artifact.
The series also stars Selma Blair, Tyler Hoechlin, Justin Chatwin, Samuel Anderson, Elizabeth Faith Ludlow, Jessica Camacho, Jake Abel, Alex Ozerov, and Barbara Williams.
Brave New World Adds Killjoys and The Originals Stars
Kylie Bunbury, Hannah John-Kamen, Sen Mitsuji, Joseph Morgan, and Nina Sosanya have joined the cast of the upcoming USA Network series Brave New World, Deadline reported.
Based on Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same name, the drama “imagines a utopian society that has achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family, and history itself.”
(Christopher Polk/Getty Images)
Harry Lloyd and Jessica Brown Findlay play New London citizens Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne, whose brief escape to the Savage Lands (and the rebellion there) lead to them returning with John the Savage (Alden Ehrenreich).
Bunbury will play Lenina’s best friend Frannie who “embraces her conditioning and New London’s social order.” John-Kamen’s Wilhelmina “Helm” Watson is “a hedonistic artist” and the “premier maker of Feelies.”
Mitsuji’s Henry Foster works with Bernard as a Bureau of Stability counselor. Morgan’s character, CJack60, is “an Epsilon relegated to physical, tedious jobs, who is deeply impacted after witnessing a horrifying event.” Sosanya’s Mustafa Mond is a World Controller who maintains the social structure and utopian promise of the new world.
Niecy Nash’s New Lifetime Movie
The When They See Us and Claws actress has joined the cast of Kidnapped: The Kamiyah Mobley Story, according to Deadline. This is the first Lifetime movie under Rock’n Robin and Lincoln Square Productions’ Robin Roberts Presents movie and documentary banner.
(David Livingston/Getty Images)
The movie tells the true story of an 18-year-old woman who learns she was kidnapped as a baby and the family raising her isn’t hers. Nash will be playing the woman who abducted her as a baby, Gloria Williams.
A companion documentary with the real-life people will air after the film.
The movie also stars Rayven Symone Ferrell as Kamiyah Mobley (renamed Alexis) and Ta’Rhonda Jones as Kamiyah’s mother.
The Hot Zone as an Anthology?
National Geographic originally promoted the Julianna Margulies-led drama as a limited series, but Deadline reported that the network, Fox 21 TV Studios, and Scott Free are in “early stages” of talking about making it into an anthology.
(National Geographic/Amanda Matlovich)
The six episodes of The Hot Zone followed an Ebola virus outbreak, and subsequent seasons would reportedly follow “a different health-related crisis where science is a big factor in finding a solution to potential epidemic or public panic.” If this does happen, it’s possible that Season 2 could follow an anthrax crisis after 9/11.
