TAGGED AS: ABC, Drama, Freeform, FX, Marvel
The latest on Gotham’s final season, Cameron Monaghan opens up about his return to Shameless, Marvel TV boss shares intel, a Lost reboot tops ABC chief’s wishlist, and more TV news.
Young Bruce Wayne’s transition into the Batman is almost complete, and reporters at Fox’s Gotham panel at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Los Angeles were treated to a sizzle reel including the first look at the series’ caped crusader in his final form. But is that star David Mazouz under the cowl?
“Yes and no,” executive producer John Stephens said. While it’s Mazouz’s face you’ll see and voice you’ll hear, it wasn’t physically him in the suit — simply because the suit was made to fit someone with a 6’4″ frame.
The series will see a 10-year flash-forward before it ends, when we’ll see older versions of other Batman characters (rather than the developing versions Gotham has portrayed over the years). Camren Bicondova confirmed that a “fully realized” version of Catwoman will appear in the finale, along with full-on versions of Penguin and Riddler. As for the Joker, it’s still up in the air.
Producers have refused to confirm whether Cameron Monaghan‘s character will be the joker, but Stephens teased, “If he’s not the Joker, then he’s someone who provides the origin story for who becomes the Joker.”
Another flash-forward tidbit: Ed and Oswald are still friends in the future. As Robin Lord Taylor (a.k.a. Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin) said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. …That’s the dance between the two of them.”
(Photo by Mario Perez/ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“We have to go back,” Jack famously pleaded to Kate on Lost. But does ABC have any interest in revisiting its seminal mystery series?
“Yes, I would like [a reboot] very much. That is a reboot I would be interested in seeing,” new ABC boss Karey Burke told reporters when asked whether she was planning to bring back the show. But unfortunately, it’s only a personal wish from a Lost superfan.
Burke, just two months into her position as ABC Entertainment president, included the “we have to go back” scene in a clip reel for reporters demonstrating the types of shows she hopes to bring to ABC in her time at the network. It was not an indication of any actual plans to reboot Lost.
“It’s literally at this point just what I dream about when I go to bed at night,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I have not spoken to [exec producers] Carlton [Cuse] or J.J. [Abrams] or ABC Studios about it. But I do often get asked the question what show would I reboot and often my answer is Lost — sometimes Alias. Nothing to report yet. Maybe ever. But it would be a fun thing to have a conversation about.”
(Photo by Paul Sarkis/SHOWTIME)
Fans were shocked when Cameron Monaghan exited Showtime’s Shameless halfway through the series’ ninth season. But when the network announced the series’ renewal for a tenth season — without star Emmy Rossum, who departs at the end of season 9 — it revealed that Monaghan’s Ian Gallagher would be returning to the series.
The actor told Rotten Tomatoes and a small group of reporters that his decision to leave (and subsequently to come back) was “a nexus of creativity and business.” While he wanted to step away for creative and business reasons, after a chat with showrunner John Wells about Ian’s future he decided to come back.
“We got to a place both creatively and financially where I felt comfortable coming back, and much of that had to do with what we were going to do with the story,” he revealed. While the season hasn’t been written yet, he hopes Ian will focus on himself in season 10.
“I think it’s interesting that he worked his way up, got his life on track, and then completely wrecked it, unfortunately — and some of that wasn’t even fully his fault,” Monaghan said. “But I think that seeing him learn to lead the family, take care of himself, and be on the straight and narrow and how to work with that would be a very interesting arc for him, so I’d like to see something outside of just him searching and being single and hooking up with people, that kind of stuff.”
As for the loss of Rossum, Monaghan emphasized that the series, about a struggling Chicago family, is an ensemble show. And because of that, “over the course of the last five to six years, characters have grown up and really branched out and the stories had become very separate. It was very rare that I would get the privilege of acting with Emmy anymore; it’s just one of those things. We’re going to lose that thread and that’s a loss for us, but that being said, I feel like we have enough other characters and storylines across the board that they can absorb and it won’t feel like too much of a change to the overall fabric of the show.”
The third and final season of FX’s Legion is debuting this year, and most of Marvel’s Netflix series have been retired. But in building up its TV library again – perhaps on new streaming service Disney+ – Marvel is not looking to repeat anything that’s been done before.
“We aren’t looking for the next Jessica Jones. There is a Jessica Jones. So it’s being able to keep telling different stories,” Marvel TV boss Jeph Loeb told reporters on Legion’s final season TCA panel on Monday. “And if you’re a comic book fan, it actually is something that you really understand because comic book fans know that each comic has a different writer, has a different tone, has a different artistry, has a different look. So it’s usually not that case if you’re running a studio, but that’s what we try to do.”
Loeb hopes that his studio has created an atmosphere in which showrunners feel that they have creative freedom to tell many different stories. Lauren Shuler Donner, Legion executive producer and a main driving force behind the X-Men franchise, said she and her colleagues want to make sure each X-Men story feels different and creative too.
“After the first three X-Men, I started to get worried that people would get tired of the X-Men and feel like, ‘I’ve seen this before.’ So when we entered into X-Men: First Class, Matthew Vaughn approached it as a Bond movie,” she said. “So we tried to change the tone in every movie. Obviously, Logan is a Western, and Deadpool is a crazy comedy, and Gambit was going to be a heist and now rom-com, and New Mutants a horror film.”
When Noah Hawley approached her with his take on Legion – which he described as the “dissection of a villain, “I thought, ‘OK. That is, then, good. Then we’re away from the X-Men movies. We’re not going to have a repeat, and this is going to be something very different,’” she said. “And that, I believe, is the only way to sustain continuing X-Men and Marvel properties. They must be unique and different every single time, or they’ll step on each other.”
(Photo by Courtesy Everett Collection)
Freeform has officially ordered a rebooted version of ’90s drama Party of Five. Instead of the Salinger kids, whose parents were killed in a car accident with a drunk driver, the new series will follow the Acostas, whose parents are deported.
“This show is about grief in a slightly different way, because what is lost is not gone forever,” executive producer and original co-creator Chris Keyser told reporters at TCA.
The series will tackle the current immigration debate head-on, which gives the show an advantage because “it’s real. It’s happening every day,” executive producer and original co-creator Amy Lippman said. Additionally, the new version’s added layer will include the parents struggling to care for their children from a distance.
Ultimately, Lippman said, “It’s our intention to make it different, and yet at the same time, there are moments almost like Easter eggs. There’s a scene in the pilot that was a scene in the original Party of Five pilot 25 years ago. There’s enough for our fans of long ago to see echoes of the original series.”
But will any original cast members show up? Perhaps in the future, but “not yet,” Lippman teased.
