ABC‘s mainstay shows will be back – such as Grey’s Anatomy (for a sixteenth season), Grey‘s spin-off Station 19 (for a third run), How to Get Away with Murder (for a sixth season), The Good Doctor (for a third outing), A Million Little Things (for a second series) and news came late Friday that Nathan Fillion’s The Rookie will also get a second season. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, which returned to screens this weekend, has already been given the nod for a seventh, 2020 run likely to, once again, fill the summer months. The Conners, the spin-off from Roseanne, has already secured a second run. Speechless, For the People and The Fix have now all been formally cancelled. On Sunday word came that Whiskey Cavalier was also gone – so expect plenty of rumours about Lauren Cohan and a Walking Dead return?
Unlike previous years, ABC has – so far – only given the greenlight to three new dramas for the 2019/2020 schedules. Cobie Smulders (of How I Met Your Mother fame and Avengers/SHIELD‘s Maria Hill) will star in a drama based around the Oni Press’graphic novel series Stumptown in which she’ll play Dex Parios a ‘strong, complicated, unapologetically sharp-witted Army veteran‘ who works as a P.I. in Portland. With a complicated personal history and only herself to rely on, she ‘solves other people’s messes with a blind eye toward her own…‘. Tonally it sounds similar to that of Jessica Jones, albeit without the superheroic factor, but still plenty of snarky fun. The series was also due to star Mark Weber, but word comes that role will be recast (news that the actor did not take well in a series of tweets).
Here’s the rather promising Stumptown trailer…
Though originally developed by NBC – and looking to be part of their new season slate – that network ultimately passed on the drama pilot Emergence and that concept/series has now been picked up by ABC. It is being produced by Agent Carter producers Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters and features Alison Tolman (Fargo) as a police chief who finds a young girl (Alexa Swinton) with no memory in the vicinity of a highly mysterious accident and finds that the girl’s identity may be the key to a massive conspiracy. The show will also star The Mentalist‘s Owain Yeoman, Ashley Aufderheide, Robert Bailey Jr., Zabryna Guevara, Donald Faison, and Highlander‘s Clancy Brown.
Here’s the Emergence trailer:
Previously known as the un-named ‘Hank Steinberg/Curtis 50 Cent Jackson drama’ For Life was given a late green-light and stars Nicholas Pinnock (Counterpart) as a prisoner-turned-lawyer who is getting his life back on track and exposing problems in the penal and legal systems. Steinberg’s last series was the recently finished The Last Ship. Indira Varma (Game of Thrones), Joy Bryant (Parenthood) and Mary Stuart Masterson co-star in the series.
There is also talk that Poppy Montgomery’s Reef Break will likely debut as a thirteen-episode run in 2020’s summer months, featuring the Unforgettable star as a thief-turned-fixer on a Pacific island. One of the series that was in contention but won’t debut this year is the revamp/sequel series NYPD Blue which would be a contemporary version of the ground-breaking 90s cop show in which Andy Sipowicz’s son, now a police officer, investigates his father’s murder. Though ABC liked the concept, they weren’t entirely satisfied with the pilot that was shot and are apparently looking to rework it with an eye to it appearing on the schedules as a mid-season replacement or the 2020/2021 season if it makes the grade.
