TAGGED AS: AMC, Comedy, FOX, Horror
This week in TV news: AMC’s hit zombie series gets a retrospective. It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s adorkable when Jess Day and Jake Peralta collide in a Fox crossover event. Plus: castings, development news, and Dug, the squirrel-loving hero, returns — IRL!
Ahead of The Walking Dead’s season 7 premiere, AMC will unleash a two-hour retrospective, The Walking Dead: Journey So Far, that will air from 9-11 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 16. The show returns a week later on Sunday, Oct. 23, but fans can get immersed in the story so far with zombie talk from the cast and executive producers. “Season by season,” AMC said in a press release, “from the moment Rick wakes up in the hospital (as told by Andrew Lincoln), all the way to the excruciating first swing of Negan’s bat (told by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and others in the lineup), the story of The Walking Dead will be told by those who have lived it.” Catch up on the plot, characters, locations, and unique terminology of the series before facing Negan’s justice in the season 7 premiere.
Fox released a sneak peek of its highly anticipated crossover episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and New Girl. Andy Samberg‘s Jake and Zooey Deschanel‘s Jess will first meet in Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode “Night Shift.” Jess, who is visiting New York, gets tangled up with Jake as he enlists her help in finding a suspect in his new case. The crossover fun continues when New Girl airs right after Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and we learn more about the reason for Jess’s journey to New York in the first place, and where the rest of the Brooklyn Nine-Nine and New Girl crew have several run-ins with each other. Catch it on Fox on Tuesday, Oct. 11.
In casting news this week, Cameron Cuffe (Florence Foster Jenkins) has been cast as Superman’s grampa, Seg-El, in SyFy’s Krypton. The Superman prequel will take place on planet Krypton before its destruction. And back on earth, César Domboy (The Walk) has been cast as an older (and “devilishly handsome”) Fergus in Outlander season 3, while U.K. newcomer Lauren Lyle will appear as Laoghaire’s daughter Marsali. Ben Barnes (Westworld) has been confirmed to join Marvel’s The Punisher as Billy Russo, Frank Castle’s best friend from the Special Forces days. Dancing with the Stars‘ Julianne Hough will guest star on Speechless as a beautiful new choir teacher, and Jim Belushi has been tapped to play Taran Killam‘s father in a new Showtime comedy called Mating.
UPDATE: Since publication, additional announcements have been made of the casting of Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Amber Rose Revah to Marvel’s The Punisher.
Chazz Palminteri and Kenny D’Aquila are shopping around a 30-minute presentation for a mafia-themed TV series based on D’Aquila’s play, Unorganized Crime. Palminteri is best known for his mob movie A Bronx Tale (which also began as a play), which is currently running as a musical on Broadway. In other development news, Diane Guerrero (Jane the Virgin, Orange is the New Black) has signed on to star and co-produce a CBS series, In the Country We Love, based on Guerrero’s own memoir of the same name about a corporate attorney working pro bono on undocumented immigration cases. In the U.K., BBC Two announced that it has picked up Motherland, a six-part half-hour series co-written by Sharon Horgan, the star and writer of Amazon’s critical hit Catastrophe who also created HBO’s new Sarah Jessica Parker–starrer Divorce. The new show is about the not-so-pretty trials of motherhood. And finally, ABC plans to bring back The Gong Show, the wacky game show created by Chuck Barris, which was a huge hit in the 1970s, with Will Arnett as executive producer (but, sadly, not host). The Gong Show will be a perfect addition to ABC’s successful stable of recent game show reboots, which includes $100,000 Pyramid, Celebrity Family Feud, and Match Game.
