Sci-Fi Storm

Despite Disney focusing a lot on its upcoming streaming service, they aren’t leaving their broadcast network out in the Marvel cold – Deadline reports ABC has given a production commitment for a series about female superheroes written by Allan Heinberg, the scribe behind Wonder Woman. No title or description has been given so far, but it is expected to focus on some lesser superheroes within the Marvel universe.

Heinberg has worked on various Shondaland series for ABC, starting with Grey’s Anatomy in 2006. And for Marvel Comics, he co-created and wrote Young Avengers and Avengers: The Children’s Crusade with co-creator/artist Jim Cheung. For DC Comics he re-launched Wonder Woman in 2006 and co-wrote JLA: Crisis Of Conscience.

ABC’s reboot of The Greatest American Hero finally has its lead in Hannah Simone, who is just wrapping up her role as Cece on Fox’s New Girl, which ends after seven seasons this Spring.

Simone will play Meera, a tequila and karaoke-loving 30-year-old Indian-American woman who becomes entrusted with a suit that gives her the power to protect the planet, but the planet has not been in more unreliable hands.

Simone was reportedly offered a number of pilots this season, before opting for The Greatest American Hero.

In a bit of a shocker announcement today, actress Jennifer Morrison has elected not to return to Once Upon A Time for a seventh season, should ABC renew the show.

Morrison’s character of Emma Swan has been central to the show for the entire run, and to lose a central character like that can be difficult for the writers to deal with. But the show was looking at a re-imagining of itself already, with word on the street that four specific characters are targeted – Swan, Hook (Colin O’Donoghue), Regina (Lana Parrilla), and Mr. Gold (Robert Carlyle). With all the original cast contracts up at the end of Season 6 (O’Donoghue still has a year on his), other current cast members were likely to be relegated to guest stars or even less. Parrilla and Carlyle are said to be close to signing, and Andrew J. West (Dead Of Summer) is expected to join as a regular after making his debut on the two-part season finale.

Morrison did agree to a guest appearance in Season 7. She announced her departure on her Instagram account:

As I reached the end of my 6 year contract on ONCE UPON A TIME, I was faced with a significant decision. ABC, Eddy Kitsis, and Adam Horowitz very generously invited me to continue as a series regular. After very careful consideration, I have decided that creatively and personally, it is time for me to move on. Emma Swan is one my favorite characters that I have ever played. My 6 years on ONCE UPON A TIME has changed my life in the most beautiful ways. I am absolutely blown away by the passion and commitment of the Oncer fans. I am so honored to have been a central part of such a special show. I will be forever grateful to Adam, Eddy, and ABC for giving me the gift of playing Emma Swan. As I move on to other creative endeavors, I will continue to attend the fan conventions whenever my professional schedule allows. I always look forward meeting the fans. If ABC Network does in fact order a season 7, I have agreed to appear in one episode, and I will most certainly continue to watch ONCE UPON A TIME. The creativity of the show runners has always inspired me, and I cannot wait to see the ways that they continue to develop and reinvent the show. #Onceuponatime #EmmaSwan #UglyDucklings

A post shared by jenmorrisonlive (@jenmorrisonlive) on May 8, 2017 at 4:48am PDT

Times Up.

ABC has pulled freshman series Time After Time after only five of seven completed episodes aired, after the show pulled dismal ratings, averaging only 2.2 million viewers.

The show was based on the novel by Karl Alexander and the 1979 movie adaptation, and featured Freddie Stroma as H.G. Wells and Josh Bowman as Jack the Ripper, brought to the present day via Wells’ time machine.

The show may have had a hard time finding viewers in a prime time landscape awash with time-bendy shows, but at the same time we didn’t see a lot of heat generating for the show in general. Although as fans of the original movie we had high hopes for the show, but due to a very busy second-half schedule it was being queued up for binge-watching on our TiVo.

There are currently no plans to air the remaining two episodes.

It’s pilot happy season, and there have been some casting announcements:

Syfy has added Patrick Fischler (Lost, Once Upon A Time), Zabryna Guevara (Gotham, The Get Down) and Ritchie Coster (The Dark Knight, Blackhat) to the pilot for Happy!, based on the graphic novel from Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson. The show follows Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni, Law & Order: SVU), an intoxicated, corrupt ex-cop turned hit man, who is adrift in a world of casual murder, soulless sex and betrayal. After a hit gone wrong, his inebriated life is forever changed by a tiny, relentlessly positive, imaginary blue winged horse.

Fischler will play Smoothie, a well-dressed mob enforcer and sardonic soulless torturer who claims to take a ‘New Age’ approach to his work.

Guevara is playing Amanda Hansen, a single mom facing every mother’s worst nightmare; the disappearance of her young daughter.

Coster is Mr. Blue/Leonardo Scaramucci, the lead villain whose wealth and status as a legitimate businessman in the wine import trade support an increasingly profitable and highly illegal sideline.

In another Marvel pilot, but for Fox, one of our favorites, Amy Acker, fresh off the final season of Person of Interest, will star in the unnamed X-Men-based show written by Matt Nix (Burn Notice) and directed by Bryan Singer. The show focuses on a family of human parents with mutant children, on the run from a mutant-hostile government. Acker will play mother Kate, who is struggling to deal with her separation from her husband Reed (Stephen Moyer, True Blood) and her increasingly challenging teenage children.
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“I can take care of myself. I’m from Texas.”

But why does Jack The Ripper seem at home in the present day?

The ABC series remake of Time After Time, starring Freddie Stroma as H G Wells and Josh Bowman as John Stevenson, premieres Sunday, March 5 at 9/8c on ABC.

At the recent TCAs, ABC entertainment president Channing Dungey said that talks are still ongoing between the network and Lucasfilm, two divisions of corporate parent Disney, for live action prime time series based on Star Wars. “We have had conversations, and we will continue to have conversations with Lucasfilm. It would be wonderful to extend the franchise.”

This comes as no surprise as Disney has been going full-Death Star with the franchise since acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012. A second animated series, Rebels airs on Disney XD, Episode VII was released last year, the first anthology film, Rogue One releases this December, Episode VIII is in production, and Disney’s theme parks are greatly expanding the presence of Star Wars in the parks.

In addition, Disney has already brought two of its other acquired properties, Marvel and the Muppets, to ABC although the latter had trouble finding an audience, not helped by creative issues with the production.

But what will the possible series entail? It could be anything – they may be discussing the possibility of the setting as part of the negotiations. But we are reminded of how five years ago George Lucas was hot on a live action series so much that they wrote as many as 50 multiple draft scripts for a series set between Episodes III and IV, which may still be available. At the time it was too expensive to actually produce. However, this is the same time period already covered by Rebels as well as the upcoming Rogue One and the second anthology movie about Han Solo, making it a crowded space – and it is possible that some of the plots were re-tuned for the other projects.

Personally, with the expanded timeline that the Star Wars universe already has, I’d like to see them explore a completely different time period, perhaps dealing with the initial reformation of the Sith and the early Republic, whether they use the former Expanded Universe as the basis or not.

It appears that execs weren’t happy with some of the test results from the Time After Time pilot, so some changes are being made – although nothing similar to the level of the changes being made to MacGyver.

The role of Vanessa Anders, a philanthropist and collector who is the modern day owner of the time machine and H.G. Wells great granddaughter as seen in the trailer below, was played by Regina Taylor (The Unit) in the pilot. But audiences weren’t as happy with the character as the rest of the pilot, resulting in the decision to rework the character and replacing Taylor with Nicole Ari Parker (Boogie Nights, Revolution).

It seems like today was deadline day on the pickups, and ABC swung the bat both ways. In my despondency over the loss of The Muppets and Castle, I was saved by the news that the network at least picked up Time After Time the series we’ve been reporting on based on the Karl Alexander novel and previously made into a 1979 feature film. We have high hopes for this one.

To no one’s surprise, ABC officially canceled Marvel’s Agent Carter after two seasons, given a nearly 50% drop in ratings and star Haley Atwell getting a new series pickup by ABC with Conviction.

Also on the plus side is that Supergirl will make the giant leap from CBS to sibling network The CW, rather than being sentenced to the Phantom Zone at least. There it will join three other Berlanti Productions-made superhero cousins: Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow. It will also join them physically, with production officially relocating to Vancouver, as we expected would happen. This is a cost-cutting movie that Warner Bros TV was already planning regardless which network picked it up. We expect there may be some additional cuts as well before production picks up. How this could also affect planned storylines remains to be seen as well. The CW also picked up three new series: Riverdale, based on the Archie Comics characters; No Tomorrow, about a straight-laced distribution center manager and a freewheeling man knocking off items on their bucket list because they believe the apocalypse is coming; and Frequency, a series adaptation of the 2000 feature film, with a female police detective who discovers she can communicate with her deceased father in the past via a ham radio.

Some Thursday tidbits for you…

Rod Roddenberry, the son of the “Great Bird of the Galaxy”, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and president of Roddenberry Entertainment, will join the upcoming Star Trek series for CBS All Access as an executive producer, along with chief operating officer Trevor Roth. Roddenberry Entertainment will co-produce the series.

Actor Ian McShane (Deadwood) will play the mysterious con man Mr. Wednesday in Starz’ series adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, where the gods of myth are about to enter a war against the gods of modern society representing money, power, etc.

ABC gave quite a few early pickups to its shows, including Once Upon A Time and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Absent, at least so far, is Agent Carter, which appears to be a long shot at this point – especially since star Haley Atwell has signed on to do a pilot for ABC. While Carter currently operates on a half-season schedule it is possible that if the other show is also half-season she could do both, but the shows only modest ratings already were pointing at an ending for the show.

And finally, the Radio Times is reporting that Peter Capaldi is set to show up in the upcoming Doctor Who spinoff Class which is set at the Coal Hill School – where the very first episode of Doctor Who started and where Clara Oswald had been teaching. “It wil[sic] have a close connection with Doctor Who so don’t be surprised if Peter pops up,” according to someone close to the production. Now, my interpretation of that statement is that it isn’t definite Capaldi will appear, but that the story will allow for it.

With several official live action spin-off series in the history of the show (K-9 and Company (only one episode produced), Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, and K-9), the Doctor only appeared on The Sarah Jane Adventures – but he did so in two incarnations: both David Tennant and Matt Smith appeared in separate two-parters.