Several of FOX‘s current batch of dramas are being renewed for next season. Emergency service drama 9-1-1 will go into a third season, the medical drama The Resident goes into its second. Empire, though having numerous troubles off-screen due to the Jesse Smollett legal case, will be back for a sixth year, though Smollett’s status on the show is unclear (as though he remains under contract and supported by his fellow cast-members, he is still somewhat under a cloud over potentially false claims he made about a racial attack that may have wasted police time).
Seth MccFarlane’s affectionate sf comedy drama The Orville got a late but not unexpected renewal. Marvel-based show The Gifted has already been cancelled after the conclusion of its current second season and the troubled Lethal Weapon – which had more off-screen drama than on-screen – will not come back either. Gotham reached its natural conclusion this year and bows out. Proven Innocent was cancelled as well. It was announced on Friday that the vampyric pandemic thriller The Passage, based on the trilogy of books by Justin Cronin, won’t be back for a second run after a promising start quickly saw a decline in ratings and the glitzy Star is also gone.
FOX‘s raft of potential new shows were in stiff competition with each other for spots on the schedule. Ultimately, FOX has picked four of the six new ventures to go forward to series.
The ‘darkly comedic’ Prodigal Son features ex-The Walking Dead star Tom Payne as ‘provocative and outrageous ‘ Malcolm Bright (the actor replaced Iron Fist‘s Finn Jones after the first table-read). Bright is a character who knows how killers think. That’s because his father Dr. Martin Whitley (Michael Sheen) was a notorious serial killer called The Surgeon and Malcolm uses his own experiences and neuroses to help the NYPD while dealing with a range of dysfunctional family issues. The series also features Bellamy Young (Scandal) and Lou Diamond Phillips.
Deputy is a ‘…modern cop drama that blends the spirit of a classic Western with a modern-day attitude and gritty authenticity‘ that stars Stephen Dorff as Bill Hollister, a lawman thrust into the more political position of Los Angeles County Sheriff. It’s the kind of show where our hero ‘doesn’t play by the rules’ and doesn’t let ‘the law get in the way of justice’ and ‘hates red tape, so just shoots through it’… which should certainly appeal to a certain demographic. The show also features Yara Martinez, Brian Van Holt and Siena Goines.
neXt is a tech-thriller in which a Silicon Valley pioneer Paul LeBlanc (John Slattery) discovers that his AI creation is evolving quickly and potentially dangerously beyond its set parameters and must team-up with cybercrime agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade) to stop it. But this isn’t a mere action-show with a high-brow theme. The series, which has spent time and money researching genuine applications of existing technology and how it is currently being developed, also examines the way technology governs and guides us in the 21st Century.
There’s also Not Just Me, a new series based on the Australian drama Sisters which features Brittany Snow, Megalyn Echikunwoke and Emily Osment and explores the repercussions when a fertility doctor (played by Timothy Hutton) is revealed to have impregnated hundreds of women with his own sperm – leading to his family having to deal with the consequences and an ever-expanding number of potential siblings.
‘Soapy’ family-drama, Filthy Rich, headlined by Kim Catrall has also just got a nod to go to series…
During the summer, FOX will also be launching the 90210 ‘revival’ a meta-show about hightened versions of the actors trying to get the show relaunched.
