• Organizers of CrimeFest 2023 this week announced that authors Mark Billingham and Elly Griffiths will be their featured guests for that event, which is to be held in Bristol, England, from May 11 to 14. There’s more about the lineup here.
• Britain’s ITV-TV network has commissioned a second series of Karen Pirie. That program debuted last fall in the UK, and was subsequently shown in the States on the streaming service BritBox. Based on stories by Val McDermid, it stars 30-year-old Scottish actress Lauren Lyle (Outlander) as a young detective sergeant in St. Andrews, Scotland, who specializes in tackling cold cases. The first season of three episodes was based on McDermid’s 2003 novel, The Distant Echo. The Killing Times reports that Season 2 is to be adapted from McDermid’s second Pirie outing, A Darker Domain (2008), and will find Pirie “reopen[ing] the investigation into the unsolved kidnap of a wealthy young heiress and her baby son back in 1985.”
• Variety brings word that U.S. cable channel Showtime plans to launch two new spin-offs from the 2006-2013 TV series Dexter, which starred Michael C. Hall as a forensic technician with the Miami Police, who also happened to be a multiple murderer on the side.
Showtime has already greenlit “Dexter: Origins” (working title), a prequel following a young Dexter at the outset of his transition into the avenging serial killer he would become. The series will see him graduate college to join Miami Metro, where he meets younger versions of various “Dexter” characters, while also depicting his family, including an alive Harry (James Remar in the original series) and a formidable teenage Deb (Jennifer Carpenter in the original series).• Who remembers this 1973 TV ad for Noxema Shaving Cream?
Despite [the inconvenient fact] that revival “Dexter: New Blood” was billed as a limited series when it premiered in 2021, giving “Dexter” a new ending after the much-hated series finale, Showtime is now developing a new installation of the sequel. If greenlit, the follow-up to “New Blood” will focus on Dexter’s son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), who survived his tumultuous reintroduction with his father and flees to New York City where he must wrestle with his own violent nature and whether, like his father, he too is compelled to kill.
• Sad to say, I still haven’t watched Paris Police 1900, the widely acclaimed French crime drama that was shown on BBC Four in the UK last fall, and is available to American viewers via the Web-only subscription streaming service MHZ Choice. Nonetheless, that show—with a slightly altered title—was recently renewed for a sophomore season. Again, we turn to The Killing Times for a plot synopsis: “Now set in 1905 (again, the clue is in the name), Paris Police 1905 follows Paris police’s vice squad—on the orders of Police Chief [Louis Jean-Baptiste Lépine] Lépine—as it begins to clean prostitutes off the city’s streets. However, a man’s body is found in the Bois de Boulogne and Inspector Antoine Jouin is entrusted with the investigation.”
• Evidently, today’s TV networks and streaming services are hard up for content. How else is there to explain this endeavor?
A new version of the 1970s buddy cop series Starsky & Hutch is in the works at Fox, with a female twist: the modern re-imagining will revolve around two female detectives, Sasha Starsky and Nicole Hutchinson. The duo solve crimes in the offbeat town of Desert City “while staying true to their friendship, their awesomeness, and somehow also trying to unravel the mystery behind who sent their fathers to prison 15 years ago for a crime they didn’t commit.” The original series, which aired on ABC from 1975 [to] 1979, centered on two detectives—the streetwise David Michael Starsky (played by Paul Michael Glaser) and the by-the-book Kenneth Richard “Hutch” Hutchinson (David Soul)—traversing the streets of the fictional Bay City, California, in a two-door Ford Gran Torino.• And here’s one of the most thick-headed ideas ever: “The Vermont State University system has announced plans to improve its libraries by getting rid of the books,” Washington Post books critic Ron Charles explains in his newsletter. “In an email, incoming president Parwinder Grewal told students and employees that the university’s libraries will move to an ‘all-digital’ format. The university website explains, ‘As of July 1, 2023, these spaces will no longer provide services including circulation and physical materials.’ This ‘enhancement’ is part of a grand plan to merge Northern Vermont University, Castleton University and Vermont Technical College.” Not unexpectedly, adds the Vermont alternative newsweekly Seven Days, this plan “has caught many by surprise, generating protests and prompting a no-confidence vote in Grewal, other administrators and trustees.”
What baffles me about so many of these unnecessary re-boots of old shows is that all of us that read a great deal of the crime fiction genre know there is a deep field of original source material already available.
ReplyDeleteI think the reboots, in general, are playing off of nostalgia and trying to gain older viewers. The reboot of the Starsky & Hutch seems more like a reboot aimed to be PC more than anything.
ReplyDeleteThe fools that want to transition libraries from physical books to digital only need to be ejected off the planet. We had a recent city council candidate here who offered the thought that the Dallas Public Library should be digital only and a number of location closed. Some would stay open and be designated some sort of "Reading Centers" where the primary focus would be to help older patrons to the pleasure of reading books on their phones. Thankfully, the voters of his district did not elect him.