TV Bits: 'Peaky Blinders,' 'The Midnight Club,' 'Punky Brewster,' 'The Wonder Years,' 'Shrill' And More
In this edition of TV Bits:
In an interview with Variety, series creator Steven Knight revealed that he hopes a Peaky Blinders film, which is currently in development and will follow up the upcoming sixth and final season of the BBC dram, could open the doors for potential TV spin-offs.
"We are in development. It's a fully formed idea and it has a beginning, middle, and end. And I think it's going to be a fitting conclusion to the story told so far, but from it, there will be things I don't really call spinoffs, but there will be other TV shows that I hope will come out of [it], that will continue to tell the story of this part of society and this family."
Peaky Blinders season 6, which will see the return of longtime cast members Cillian Murphy, Helen McRory, and more, and will feature series newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy, is currently in production with no set air date.
Wanna hear a scary story?
Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy (a.k.a. the brains behind The Haunting of Hill House) are turning one of Christopher Pike's most beloved novels in a new Netflix series.
Meet the cast of The Midnight Club! pic.twitter.com/I1oTTelOop
— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) February 1, 2021
Meet the cast of The Midnight Club, the next Netflix horror series from The Haunting of Hill House's Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy. Flanagan announced that the adaptation of the Christopher Pike novel will star Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, William Chris Sumpter, Aya Furukawa, Annarah Shephard and Sauriyan Sapkota, as the members of the Midnight Club, while "familiar faces" to Flanagan fans such as Zach Gilford, Samantha Sloyan, and Matt Biedel join the cast in supporting roles. Also starring in the series as "the enigmatic doctor who runs this hospice for young adults," is Heather Langenkamp of A Nightmare on Elm Street fame.
Soleil Moon Frye reprises her role as the '80s icon Punky Brewster, now a 40-something professional photographer who finds herself "newly single" and trying to navigate the life as a single mother. But as she's "trying to get her life back on track when she meets Izzy, a young girl in the foster system who reminds Punky a lot of her younger self."
Watch the trailer for the Punky Brewster revival, which starts streaming on Peacock on February 25, 2021.
Speaking of '80s classics, The Wonder Years reboot has been picked up to pilot by ABC, per Deadline. The reboot of the 1988 coming-of-age TV series, which is set to shoot its pilot this spring, will be set in the same era as the original and follow a black middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama in the late 1960s. (Here's a fun fact: if the modern series were set back 20 years as the original Wonder Years was, it would take place in 2001.)
Dave exec producer Saladin Patterson writes and executive produces, while original series star Fred Savage will direct and executive produce. Empire co-creator Lee Daniels and his Lee Daniels Entertainment partner Marc Velez will also executive produce.
The critically acclaimed comedy Shrill, based on the book Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West and starring Aidy Bryant, will end its run with its upcoming third season, according to Variety. Shrill was renewed for an eight-episode third season in March last year, just two months after the second season launched, and production completed filming in Portland, Oregon late last year under COVID-19 safety guidelines. No release date for Shrill's third and final season has yet been set.
Home Improvement alums Tim Allen and Richard Karn are reuniting as hosts of the new History Channel competition series Assembly Required — the first time in 22 years since the stars worked together on a big TV project. History Channel released an official promotional trailer for Assembly Required, which you can watch above, hyping up the duo's reunion, construction competition series, which will consist of 10 hour-long episodes hosted by Allen and Karn with woodworking DIY YouTube star April Wilkerson serving as the show's "resident expert."
Deadline reports that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sam Branson, and Chelsea Clinton's new production company, HiddenLight Productions, has acquired the series adaptation rights to best-selling author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon's The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice. The project, which tells the story an all-women Kurdish militia who took on ISIS in Northern Syria, is planned to help boost the profile of their new production banner, which was launched in December last year.
Alan Cumming has been cast in a recurring role opposite Michael Sheen and Tom Payne on the second season of Fox's serial-killer thriller drama Prodigal Son, Deadline reports. Cumming will appear in two episodes as Simon Hoxley, "a supremely confident and cocky Europol agent known as 'The MindSleuth'" who travels to New York to solve the murder of Nicholas Endicott, which "puts Malcolm Bright (Payne) in his crosshairs."
Vikings: Valhalla, the upcoming Netflix spin-off of the beloved History Channel series Vikings, has revealed its cast and characters. Jeb Stuart (Die Hard) acts as showrunner for the historical action series, which is on track to debut on Netflix sometime in 2021 or 2022. The series follows an all-new crew of Vikings "in the early 11th century and chronicles the legendary adventures of some of the most famous Vikings who ever lived – Leif Eriksson, Freydis Eriksdotter, Harald Hardrada and the Norman King William the Conqueror. These men and women will blaze a path as they fight for survival in the ever changing and evolving world." The cast includes Sam Corlett, Frida Gustavsson, Leo Suter, Bradley Freegard, Jóhannes Jóhannesson, Laura Berlin, David Oakes, Caroline Henderson, and Pollyanna McIntosh, per Collider.
Apple TV+ has renewed its international thriller Tehran for a second season. The series, which was created by Moshe Zonder, Dana Eden and Maor Kohn, and directed by Daniel Syrkin, stars Niv Sultan as Mossad agent Tamar Rabinyan "who goes deep undercover on a dangerous mission in Tehran that places her and everyone around her in dire jeopardy."
Variety confirms that Richard Lewis will not appear in Curb Your Enthusiasm season 11 after the recurring actor, who plays semi-autobiographical version of himself on the HBO comedy shared the news on Twitter that he has to take a break from the role to recover from multiple surgeries. "For 20 years, I had the greatest comedy gig I could have ever imagined with my oldest and dearest friend LD. Honestly, I'm crushed that I won't be part of this season," Lewis told Variety, adding that he "hopes to be there for Season 12."
ABC has handed out a pilot order to National Parks, a drama written by Kevin Costner. The series, which comes from A+E Studios and Disney's 20th Television, revolves around "the small group of elite NPS agents as they solve these crimes while protecting these national treasures," per THR. Costner, Helbing and Jon Baird will co-write the script and executive produce alongside A+E Studios president Barry Jossen and Tana Jamieson. Costner, who is currently starring in Paramount Network's Western drama Yellowstone, appears to not be starring in the show.