PRODUCTION & DEVELOPMENT Kristin Chenoweth is slated to topline a comedy series in development at Disney+ that she brought to the service alongside creator Paul Rudnick and producer Dan Jinks. In The Biggest Star In Appleton, Chenoweth plays a Wisconsin mom, wife and waitress who vibes off her small-town stardom at the community theater but is threatened when a struggling NY chorus girl moves back home. AMC Studios is looking to develop Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne universe novels as a series. The company snagged TV rights to the books, the third of which published this week, with VanderMeer set to serve as exec producer and creative consultant on the project. Apple, Oprah Winfrey and Impact Partners are at work on a music industry sexual assault doc with filmmaker Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, the team behind college campus rape doc The Hunting Ground and The Invisible War. Untitled project follows a fast-rising former female music exec who struggles with whether or not to go public with her truth of assault and abuse by a notable music industry figure. Endemol Shine and Gal Gadot are developing a US version of Israeli crime drama Queens. Endemol Shine North America and Endemol Shine Israel are partnering with Gadot and Jaron Varsano’s Pilot Wave on the new version of the series, which follows a group of women who must band together after the men in their family are murdered by a rival crime syndicate. Original series returns for a second season in Israel in 2020. HBO Max is laughing it up, with green lights for four new one-hour comedy specials featuring, in turn, Tracy Morgan, John Early, and up-and-coming stand-ups Rose Matafeo and Ahir Shah. Also at the WarnerMedia streamer, HBO Max will be the exclusive US home of period drama Boys (working title), in partnership with Britain’s Channel 4. Five-part series charts the emotional journey of five friends during the ‘80s, a decade that notably saw the rise of AIDS. Cast includes Olly Alexander, Nathaniel Curtis and Shaun Dooley. Starz greenlit Becoming Elizabeth, rooted in the early life of England’s queen and created by playwright/TV screenwriter Anya Reiss (Spur of the Moment, The Acid Test) who will exec produce with The Forge’s George Ormond (National Treasure) and George Faber (Shameless). Reiss’ all-female writing team includes Emily Ballou (Traitors), Anna Jordan (Succession) and Suhayla El- Bushra (Ackley Bridge). Reelz gave a four-ep order to Friends Speak, which features friends of notorious criminals or their victims sharing accounts of the days leading up to and after the crimes. The move follows the ratings success of Casey Anthony: Her Friends Speak on the network. Friends Speak hails from Kinetic Content and Pyramid Productions, and will debut Sunday, December 8 with Jodi Arias: The Friends Speak. Aurora Guerrero and Deborah Kampmeier joined the director roster for Ava DuVernay’s upcoming romantic anthology drama Cherish the Day on OWN. ABC Entertainment and Fremantle announced actor/comedian Joel McHale will return as host of game show Card Sharks, which recently was picked up for a second season and is set to air in 2020. Indie studio Roadside Attractions acquired Robert Dugoni’s spy thriller The Eighth Sister to develop as a series. First book in a planned series centers on the action and deception experienced by a long-retired CIA case-officer who’s brought back by his former bureau chief to run a secret mission in Moscow. Roadside Attractions’ head of television Jennifer Berman will exec produce with Roadside co-presidents Howard Cohen and Eric d’Arbeloff. Bron Studios and Palomar-Mediawan Group are co-producing eight-part post-apocalyptic spaghetti western That Dirty Black Bag. Series is set in a world where bounty hunters and bandits are ready to do anything, and bloody vendettas are the norm. NEW & RETURNING SERIES CollegeHumor’s Dropout announced geography trivia/physical challenge game Where in the Eff is Sarah Cincinnati? will premiere Wednesday, December 18 with a new ep releasing weekly through January 22. New Year’s Day is the premiere date for Netflix thriller Messiah. Streamer dropped a teaser for the Michelle Monaghan-starring series, which weaves multiple perspectives around a CIA officer’s quest to determine the identity of a mysterious man whose followers believe he’s a miracle-worker but who could be a con man determined to undo global political order. It’s one Disaster after another at Smithsonian Channel. A new crop of aviation catastrophes abound in the new season of Air Disasters, premiering Sunday, January 5 at 8p, followed at 9p by a new season of Disasters at Sea. From a routine ferry trip turned deadly to the mysterious loss of a fishing vessel in the Bering Sea, series reveals what went wrong on a new fleet of fatal voyages. Peter Weber, who caught Hannah Brown’s eye for a hot second on her season of The Bachelorette, will search for his soul mate on season 24 of The Bachelor. Debuting on ABC on Monday, January 6 with a three-hour special, the premiere will feature the season’s first group and one-on-one dates - a first for the show - and an appearance by Brown. Bravo’s newest competition series Spy Games, premiering Monday, January 20 at 10p, dives into the world of espionage, with real-life intelligence experts assessing contestants’ performances to determine who has what it takes to outwit the game and succeed at one of the world’s most mysterious professions. Series is hosted by model and martial artist Mia Kan. If you get annoyed waiting for a toaster to pop, imagine what watching the clock does to Larry David. A new teaser for season 10 of his HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, returning after a nearly three-year hiatus, references the fans’ impatience in a perfectly Curb manner. Majority of the cast is back for the season, which debuts in January, and Vince Vaughn reportedly is in for a story arc. Set in a galaxy far, far away, game show Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge will test young contestants’ abilities in the core Jedi principles of strength, knowledge and bravery as they face obstacles in an attempt to achieve the rank of Jedi Knight. Series, hosted by Ahmed Best, will stream exclusively on Disney+ beginning in 2020. Mapleworth Murders, an upcoming short-form comedic murder-mystery on Quibi, will star JB Smoove and Hayley Magnus, and feature more than 20 others including former SNL cast members Tina Fey, Chris Parnell, Andy Samberg, Fred Armisen, Tim Meadows and Maya Rudolph, and Patton Oswalt. Series is written by and stars Paula Pell and John Lutz. Lorne Michaels and Seth Meyers are exec-producing. Dax Shepard (Bless This Mess) Rob Corddry (Ballers) and motoring journalist Jethro Bovingdon are stepping behind the wheel to host the US reboot of Top Gear for Discovery’s MotorTrend. Series will debut on the subscription streaming service in spring 2020, and will chronicle the auto-focused adventures of the hosts. COMING UP Telemundo’s coverage of the 2019 Miss Universe Competition will include programming on Telemundo.com and its social media platforms as a prelude to the 68th edition of the event that will air live and exclusively in Spanish on the net Sunday, December 8 at 7p. A&E Network’s Emmy-winning docuseries Born This Way celebrates the season with one-hour series finale special A Very Born This Way Christmas on Wednesday, December 18 at 9p. Ahead of the finale, aetv.com will premiere six new digital shorts, Born This Way: Moving Forward, on Friday, December 13. CBS will broadcast The Marvel of This Night: Christmas at Duke University Chapel on Tuesday, December 24 at 11:35p. Filmed at the Duke University Chapel, hourlong special features Christmas carols accompanied by three of the Chapel’s pipe organs, and traditional Scripture readings. INSP is airing December movie event We Three Heroes, featuring films starring James Arness, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne all month long. HGTV will ring in 2020 with a New Year’s Day lineup that kicks off with a refreshed version of A Very Brady Renovation at 7a that includes newly added memories, reflections and behind-the-scenes secrets from the Brady cast. Next up is a marathon of My Lottery Dream Home starring David Bromstad, followed by the HGTV Dream Home Special 2020 at 8p, a new Property Brothers ep and lastly HGTV House Party at 11p. Lifetime dropped the first trailer for its upcoming Robin Roberts Presents: Stolen by My Mother: The Kamiyah Mobley Story, premiering January 18 at 8p. Exec-produced by Roberts, film stars Niecy Nash (When They See Us, Claws), Rayven Ferrell (The Hate U Give) and Ta’Rhonda Jones (Empire), in the true story of a young woman who discovers at age 18, she was abducted as a baby and the family she knew to be hers, wasn’t hers at all. TECH TALK Netflix and YouTube will remain the No. 1 and 2 most-watched video platforms next year, but with competitors lining up their relative share of time spent viewing will dip starting in 2020. According to new research from eMarketer, new services including Disney+, HBO Max and Apple TV+ will erode the dominance of Netflix and YouTube in the coming years. There’ll be no more forced ad breaks for all cloud DVR recordings of YouTube’s live TV streaming service. YT announced via Twitter that consumers can now fast-forward through ad breaks on recorded shows from CBS, the Smithsonian Channel and POP TV; the CBS family of networks was the last hold-out for forced breaks. League of Legends developer Riot Games will pay a minimum of $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of women employees who alleged the company’s “bro culture” resulted in systemic gender discrimination. Close to 1,000 women who worked at Riot during the past five years are eligible to receive a payout from the settlement fund. KIDS NEWS Wow! Unlimited Media’s Frederator Studios is developing a new series based on the brand Catbug, which has a strong foothold in the world of animated shorts, and shopping it to streaming and linear networks along with complementary social network programming, short-form animated videos, e-books and web comics. Pendleton Ward, who created long-running series Adventure Time, is the creator of Catbug. Fueled by the launch of more than 15 new channels, French animation studio Xilam Animation hit 15 billion views on YouTube and reached 15 million subscribers across its channels on the platform. For all of 2019, the company projects it will increase YouTube views by 50 percent compared with 2018. PODCAST POSTS Boomtown, a new 10-part weekly podcast series that looks at the biggest oil boom in history, is new from Imperative Entertainment and Texas Monthly. Texas Monthly’s Christian Wallace follows entrepreneurs from both scrappy start-ups and multinational conglomerates as they try and make their fortune in oil. ADVERTISING & BRANDS New and existing streaming video services will account for multiple billions of dollars in domestic advertising spending by the time they are all operating at scale, according to ad agency GroupM’s latest US forecast. Total spending on advertising in the US is expected to rise 6.2 percent in 2019. Digital advertising will propel larger growth than initially projected for the overall ad market for the remainder of 2019 and 2020, the report notes, with digital ads representing a 50 percent share of advertising with 20 percent growth for 2019 and 15 percent growth for 2020. Digital companies including Alphabet, Amazon, Booking.com, eBay, Facebook, IAC, Netflix and Uber are significantly contributing to the overall double-digit growth for advertising and are likely to spend more than $30 billion on advertising this year, GroupM estimates. Among other report highlights: - TV advertising will end 2019 with a 2 percent decline, ex-political. National TV advertising will be closer to zero, or even up very slightly, while local is down by low single digits.
- Outdoor should be the fastest-growing “traditional” medium, up by 8 percent.
- US political advertising is expected to reach $10 billion or more.
With the 10th anniversary of Hallmark Channel’s “Countdown to Christmas” in full swing, the network announced a partnership with JCPenney featuring custom on-air content, digital and live activations and in-store retail displays. The collaboration centers around the new Hallmark Channel original holiday movie, “Christmas at Dollywood,” which will debut Sunday, December 8 at 8p. CASTING Adhir Kalyan (Rules of Engagement) scored the title role in upcoming CBS comedy pilot The United States of Al, from co-creator/exec producer Chuck Lorre… Adriana Paz (The Empty Hours), Kristyan Ferrer (Sin Nombre, 600 Miles), Octavio Pisano (iLove, If Loving You is Wrong), Cynthia Kaye McWilliams (Bosch, Nashville) and Julio Cedillo (Sicario) are in as series regulars opposite Michael Chiklis and Juan Pablo Raba in Paramount Network’s Coyote… Michael Beach (ER), Anne-Marie Johnson (For The People) and Kellee Stewart (Guess Who) nabbed recurring roles in OWN’s upcoming Ava DuVernay romantic anthology series. GOING GLOBAL HBO Europe ordered its first Danish original. Eight-part series Kamikaze is an adaptation of Erlend Loe’s novel Muleum, which follows an 18-year-old young woman through an existential crisis after she loses everything. BBC One will premiere its gruesome take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula on New Year’s Day. Co-produced with Netflix and written by Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, miniseries will air on three consecutive nights. The UK broadcaster will unleash a revisited Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on December 22, three days after FX’s December 19 premiere. |