In this edition of TV Bits:
- The next season of Archer gets a new title
- Westworld season 2 casts two more actors
- Julia Roberts will star in a TV show based on a podcast
- A first look at season 3 of the USA series Mr. Robot
- The premiere date of Comedy Central’s Nathan For You
- And more!
The ninth season of the FXX animated comedy series Archer won’t arrive until sometime in 2018, but when it does finally make its way to the small screen, the season will have a new title: Archer: Danger Island. Past seasons of the show have included names like Archer Vice and Archer: Dreamland, and the new batch of episodes will take place on a remote beach in the South Pacific in 1939. I love this show, so the idea of these characters essentially playing pirates sounds pretty perfect.
HBO’s Westworld is another big show that won’t return until 2018, but according to TVLine, the series has snagged two more actors to join its cast in the upcoming second season. Neil Jackson (Sleepy Hollow, Blindspot) will be a series regular playing a character named Nicholas, “a charming man who finds himself in uncharted territory,” and Jonathan Tucker (Hannibal, Justified) will be a recurring character named Major Craddock, “an imposing military officer.”
Amazon has given a two-season straight-to-series order to Homecoming, a new show starring movie star Julia Roberts that’s based on the Gimlet Media podcast of the same name. I listened to the podcast a couple of months ago (which features voice work by Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, David Schwimmer, and more), and it’s very good.
Homecoming is a psychological thriller that centers on a caseworker at a secret government facility (Roberts) and a soldier eager to rejoin civilian life.
The podcast plays out through recordings of conversations between the therapist and the soldier, and then the therapist and her boss, and it’s pretty fascinating stuff. I don’t want to give anything away, but you should check it out if you’re interested in listening to something with solid production values and a terrific cast, and I’m fascinated with how director Sam Esmail will turn it into something visual for a TV audience.
Speaking of Esmail, here’s the first look at Rami Malek in season 3 of his other series, USA’s Mr. Robot, courtesy of EW.
“Season 3 is about Elliot trying to bounce back and fight against the people who have been using him,” said Esmail, who reveals that a central theme for the 10-episode run (which premieres in October) is disintegration. “Elliot isn’t going to take this lying down.”
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapted Ted Chiang‘s short story Story of Your Life into the sci-fi film Arrival, which was my favorite movie of last year. So I’m excited to hear that Heisserer is developing another one of Chiang’s stories as a prestige drama for AMC. This one is called Liking What You See: A Documentary. Set in the future, it takes place in a world in which our obsession with beauty has become so toxic that a neurologist figures out a way to remove our ability to see beauty at all in people. Naturally, the beauty industry isn’t thrilled about this, so a culture war breaks out. Sounds like a cool premise, and since I have a book of Chiang’s short stories (that includes Liking What You See) sitting unread on my shelf, I might have to bump it to the top of my reading list.
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