TAGGED AS: HBO Max, streaming, television, TV
More animated Game of Thrones in development, Comic-Con is @Home again this year. Plus, the week’s biggest trailers and casting and development news in TV and streaming.
TOP STORY
George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones universe is expanding (again). HBO Max is developing two animated Game of Thrones series (make that two additional series, as the streaming network had already announced one GoT animated series earlier this year), reports THR’s James Hibberd, author of the Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series book.
One of the two fresh ideas in development: a story set in The Golden Empire of Yi Ti, a region of Essos, in the southeastern “limits of the known world.” Yi Ti’s society is one of the oldest and most advanced in the world, and is inspired by Imperial China.
THR also offers news on a previously-reported GoT spin-off project that will not be moving forward. Flea Bottom, a live-action prequel, that was to be set in the King’s Landing slum, was never fully confirmed by HBO. Can’t say that it’s a surprise that one’s getting the boot; even by harsh GoT standards, a story set in those slums sounded like a particularly bleak viewing experience.
Comic-Con@Home is going on now. The first news out of the annual convention includes a November premiere for Amazon’s adaptation of the late Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time fantasy novels and a trailer for Star Trek: Prodigy (above). Friday’s Amazon panel, with a chat with The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins, and the Paramount+ “Peak Animation” panel, including Star Trek universe news, are available to watch on the Comic-Con International YouTube page.
Comic-Con@Home Coverage:
• Comic-Con 2021: All the Trailers for Movies and TV Shows
• Comic-Con@Home 2021 Guide: What and When To Watch
• TV Premiere Dates 2021
More trailers and teasers released this week:
• The Chair stars Sandra Oh as Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim, the new Chair of the English Department at prestigious Pembroke University. The series also stars Jay Duplass, Holland Taylor, Bob Balaban, and David Morse. Premieres Aug. 12. (Netflix)
• What We Do in the Shadows’ third season teaser doesn’t address that big cliffhanger from season 2, but it does show us how the gang is able to have fun walking around outside in the daytime. Sort of. Premieres Sept. 2. (FX)
• Brand New Cherry Flavor is a limited series about a filmmaker (Rosa Salazar) who finds her movie ambitions running up against zombies, magic, vengeance, hit men, and supernatural kitties. Premieres Aug. 13. (Netflix)
• Heels is a new wrestling drama starring Stephen Amell and Alexander Ludwig as a pair of brothers chasing their dreams. Premieres Aug. 15. (Starz)
• Reservation Dogs, from co-creators and executive producers Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, is a comedy about the exploits of four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma. Premieres Aug. 9. (FX)
• Sex Education returns for season 3 with Girls star Jemima Kirke as the new head teach at Moordale. Stars Gillian Anderson. Premieres Sept. 17. (Netflix)
• Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is a three-part documentary series, premiering around the former president’s 60th birthday. Premieres Aug. 3. (HBO).
For all the latest TV and streaming trailers subscribe to the Rotten Tomatoes TV YouTube channel.
(Photo by Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic)
Arrow star Josh Segarra has joined the cast of the Marvel series She-Hulk, starring Tatiana Maslany and Mark Ruffalo (reprising his Marvel movie role as the Hulk), Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Ginger Gonzaga. Deadline reported the casting, but Marvel has not commented on it. It’s unknown who Segarra will be playing in the legal comedy on Disney+. He will be seen in season 2 of The Other Two on HBO Max in August, and his past credits include playing RuPaul’s boyfriend in AJ and the Queen on Netflix and Pastor Christian in the Dolly Parton movie Christmas in the Square.
America Ferrara will play an entrepreneur whose life is rattled when she joins WeWork in Apple TV’s upcoming limited series WeCrashed, based on Wondery podcast about the rise and crash of the office space rental startup. Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto also star.
Blue Bloods star Bridget Moynahan will reprise her role as Natasha, Mr. Big’s second wife, in HBO Max’s upcoming Sex and the City sequel series And Just Like That …. Big cheated on Natasha with Carrie in the original series, and according to an allegedly leaked script from the new series. Carrie and Big may not be living happily ever after either.
Steven Weber is being promoted to series regular on NBC’s Chicago Med, so expect his Dr. Dean Archer to continue to ruffle feathers in the new season. (Deadline)
Alanis Morissette, Nick Lachey, will.i.am, and Grimes will be judges on Fox’s Alter Ego singing competition. 106 & Park’s Rocsi Diaz will host the series, in which everyday people get to pursue their musical dreams, performing as an avatar, in a Masked Singer-ish kinda way.
To All the Boys star Lana Condor will star in Take Out, a Hulu action comedy created by actor and writer Randall Park (Always Be My Maybe). Condor will play a young woman trying to manager her personal life and restaurant job, and her secret mission to stop nefarious mobsters trying to take over New York City. (THR)
AMC’s moon drama, Moonhaven, has cast Emma McDonald (Going the Distance) as a “Han Solo–esque” rebel who’s part of the story to help find a way to save Earth. Deadline reports. McDonald plays the lead, a cargo pilot and smuggler named Bella Sway. Kadeem Hardison (A Different World and Teenage Bounty Hunters) has also joined the cast, playing Arlo, a detective pulled into the fight to keep utopian colony Moonhaven going.
Psych star Corbin Bernsen has joined the cast of HBO’s Watergate limited series The White House Plumbers, playing Richard Kleindienst, an attorney general who refuses to protect the political wrongdoers from investigation. Meanwhile, actor and screenwriter Alexis Valdés will play Felipe De Diego, a real estate broker who participates in all the wrongdoing escapades, except the one that finally gets them arrested. (Deadline)
Alfre Woodard has joined the BET+ period drama The Porter, where she’ll executive produce and play a woman who runs a local brothel in the series about 1920s railway workers who join together to form the first Black union in the world. (Deadline)
Victoria Cartegna (Servant) will be part of the Batwoman cast for its upcoming third season on The CW. She’ll play Renee Montoya, a Gotham City police officer who left the department, but has now returned to run the “freaks division” of the GCPD, where she hopes to push out the baddies.
(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images; William Morrow)
The Shield creator Shawn Ryan has a series order from Netflix for The Night Agent, a political conspiracy thriller based on author Matthew Quirk’s 2019 New York Times bestseller of the same name. Deadline reports the story is a “sophisticated, character-based, action-thriller” about a low-level FBI agent who works in the basement of the White House answering the phone. It usually doesn’t, until one night that it does, sending him off on an unexpected, dangerous conspiracy that leads to the Oval Office. Ryan will executive producer and serve as showrunner of the 10-episode series.
Amazon has ordered a series adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, the 2005 fantasy novel. The six-episode series, with casting already in the works, revolves around the Mr. Nancy character from American Gods, and will begin filming later this year in Scotland. From Amazon: “Based on Gaiman’s novel of the same name, Anansi Boys follows Charlie Nancy, a young man who is used to being embarrassed by his estranged father. But when his father dies, Charlie discovers that his father was Anansi, trickster god of stories. And he learns that he has a brother. Now his brother, Spider, is entering Charlie’s life, determined to make it more interesting but making it a lot more dangerous.” Orlando Jones, who played Mr. Nancy on American Gods, is unlikely to play the character in the new series, after saying he had been fired from the Starz series.
Charlize Theron is developing a series adaptation of The Finale Girl Support Group, a recently-released novel of the same name by author Grady Hendrix, at HBO Max. The horror story revolves around a support group of the “final girls” – six women who were the survivors of a serial killer whose crimes were the basis for hit teen slasher movies. (Deadline)
Reasonable Doubt, the Larry Wilmore-produced legal drama starring Kerry Washington, will move from ABC to Hulu. The series, first announced in 2019 and based on attorney Shawn Holley, part of O.J. Simpson’s legal defense team, will see Washington reunite with Producer and writer Raamla Mohamed, who was also a writer on Scandal and Little Fires Everywhere.
Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz is developing a series about her father with Sony Pictures Television’s TriStar, Variety reports. The series would be based on the books X: A Novel and The Awakening of Malcolm X, both of which were co-written by Ilyasah Shabazz, and cover her father’s life from his childhood, when his father was lynched and his mother was forced into an institution against her will, to his imprisonment as a young man and later joining the Nation of Islam and becoming Malcolm X.
CNN announced it will launch its own streaming service, called (what else?) CNN+ during the first quarter of 2022. The service will feature “original, live, on demand and interactive programming as a standalone direct-to-consumer service with offerings that are separate and distinct from CNN.”
In August, Discovery+ will launch Celebrity IOU: Joyride, in which celebs help pimp autos for their loved ones. Master mechanic Ant Anstead and car guru Cristy Lee host, while celebs getting dirty and greasy for their beloveds include Danny Trejo, Mary J. Blige, James Marsden, Tony Hawk, Octavia Spencer, and Renée Zellweger (who’s rumored to be dating Anstead, who she met when filming her episode of the new series).
Paramount+ has ordered Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, a 10-episode prequel series to the classic 1978 musical movie. The series will originally a go at HBO Max, where it was called Grease: Rydell High, before it was cancelled and moved to Paramount+. No details on casting yet for the story, which takes place four years before the action in the John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John film.
(Photo by Summit Entertainment)
The Book of Eli and Menace II Society co-director Albert Hughes will direct two of three episodes of the John Wick prequel series The Continental at Starz. The three-night event series, which THR reports have movie-length episodes with $20 million budgets each, is set at the titular hotel for assassins from the John Wick films.
Baby Shark’s Big Show has been renewed for a second season at Nickelodeon, and soon will hit the big screen. The project inspired by the song parents have suffered through a zillion times – actually, more than 8.9 billion times, the number of times the “Baby Shark” video has been viewed, making it the most viewed YouTube video of all time – the big-screen movie is in the early stages, and will be co-produced by Nickelodeon. (THR)
HBO Max has ordered The Climb with Jason Momoa, an eight-episode rock climbing competition in which “amateur climbers are put through a rigorous series of mental and physical challenges, utilizing the most intimidating ascents in the world to crown the world’s best amateur climber.” Momoa is producing via his On the Roam production company.
Lena Waithe is producing Being Mary: The Mary Tyler Moore Documentary, the first authorized biography of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show icon. The doc, which will be released in theaters next year, will tell Moore’s life story via access from her estate, along with input from colleagues, friends, and other loved ones. Moore died in 2017.
New York radio DJ and author Charlamagne tha God will host a weekly Comedy Central talk show co-created and produced by Stephen Colbert. Tha God’s Honest Truth with Lenard ‘Charlamagne’ McKelvey will premiere on Sept. 17 and will feature a “redemptively comedic, refreshingly unfiltered, and unapologetically Black” take on social issues.
