Media Murder for Monday (this week on a Tuesday) returns with some of the highlights from the latest crime Drama news:

AWARDS

The Golden Globe Award nominations were announced yesterday and include a few crime-themed films, including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Post as Best Drama contenders; Best Actress nods to Jessica Chastain, for Molly's Game, Frances McDormand, for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Meryl Streep, for The Post, and Michelle Williams, for All the Money in the World; and Best Actor nominations for Tom Hanks, The Post, and Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. On the TV side, Best Actor and Actress honors (in various drama categories) include Bob Odenkirk, (Better Call Saul); Liev Schreiber, (Ray Donovan); Jason Bateman, (Ozark); Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, (The Wizard of Lies); Kyle MacLachlan, (Twin Peaks); Jessica Biel (The Sinner); Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Alexander Skarsgard (Big Little Lies); Ewan McGregor and David Thewlis (Fargo), and Christian Slater (Mr. Robot). One other interesting nomination of note: Christopher Plummer was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture for All the Money in the World, taking over Kevin Spacey's part that was cut out of the film following his recent sexual harassment controversy.

The Writers Guild of America also announced their nominations for the year's best TV projects. Best Drama Series nods include The Americans and Better Call Saul; Best New Series nominations include American Vandal, The Deuce, and Ozark; and the Long Form Adapted category is headlined by Big Little Lies, (teleplay by David E. Kelley and based on the Novel by Liane Moriarty), Fargo, and The Wizard of Lies (based on the Bernie Madoff book by Diane B. Henriques).

The International Emmy Awards were announced and include a Best Performance by an Actor nod to Kenneth Branagh for his portrayal of Wallander, from the series based on the crime fiction of Henning Mankell, and a Best Performance by an Actress win by Anna Friel for her work in the British crime noir detective series Marcella. The Best Series Award went to the thriller Mammon 2 for its episode, "Nothing is Just Politics," in which freedom of speech is under attack as a well-known commentator and journalist in Norway's biggest newspaper is brutally murdered.


MOVIES

Anonymous Content is going all in on the series of thriller novels by Lars Kepler, the pseudonym for the married Swedish authors Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril, after optioning both a film adaptation of The Sandman and a TV series adaptation of The Hypnotist. The Sandman tells the chilling story of a manipulative serial killer and the two cops who try to beat him at his own game, while The Hypnotist takes place in the frigid climes of Tumba, Sweden, where a gruesome triple homicide attracts the interest of Detective Inspector Joona Linna in the sole surviving witness—the boy whose family was killed before his eyes.

Narcos director Jose Padilha is coming on board to develop Master Thieves as a possible feature film at Sony. The project is based on the true story of the 1990 Isabel Gardner Museum Heist in Boston, the single biggest property theft in the history of the United States. Over $500M worth of art was stolen and it remains one of the more celebrated unsolved mysteries, with the art never recovered and the identities of the thieves never discovered.

Even while Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express is still in its first run in theaters, there are already plans afoot for a sequel adaptation of another Agatha Christie novel, Death on the Nile. Twentieth Century Fox has hired Orient Express screenwriter Michael Green to return for the project, and although Branagh hasn't yet signed on, he's expected to return to the director’s chair and reprise his role of the mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Lit management/producer Sentient has acquired Tony Mosher’s survival thriller spec script Sirius in competitive bidding, with Taken helmer Pierre Morel set to direct. The film tells the story of two members of a Danish special forces dog sled team — one a sage veteran and the other a bold new recruit — who become ensnared in an international incident while on a mission to one of the coldest and deadliest places on Earth, facing off not only against highly trained adversaries but also cruel forces of nature.

Kyla Drew (Prisoners) and Annie Ilonzeh (All Eyez on Me) have been cast in Peppermint, the Jennifer Garner-starring action thriller that also has John Ortiz, Richard Cabral, Juan Pablo Raba and John Gallagher Jr. in the cast. Garner plays Riley North, a young mother who awakens from a coma after her husband and daughter are killed in a brutal attack on the family. When the system shields the murderers from justice, Riley sets out to transform herself from citizen to urban guerrilla to methodically deliver her personal brand of justice. Drew will play Maria, a homeless street kid whom Riley takes un under her protective wing, while Ilonzeh is FBI agent Lisa Inman, who tracks Riley down.

Ryan Reynolds is set to join the world of Pokemon in the forthcoming live-action Detective Pikachu film from Legendary. The project was originally announced in summer 2016 during the Pokemon Go mobile game craze and will be directed by Rob Letterman with a script by Nicole Perlman and Alex Hirsch.

James Mangold is set to direct the untitled Patty Hearst drama for Fox, with Elle Fanning in talks to star as the heiress. The film will be an adaptation of Jeffrey Toobin’s best-selling American Heiress, and is set to delve into Toobin’s reporting on Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and her subsequent run from the FBI after turning into an SLA sympathizer.

The new trailer for Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here features Joaquin Phoenix as a PTSD-ridden vet who slowly unravels as he attempts to bust a senator’s daughter out of a sex-trafficking ring.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Ruth Ware’s New York Times-bestselling psychological thriller The Lying Game is being turned into a television series by Entertainment One (eOne) and The Gotham Group. The novel starts after a woman walking her dog in an idyllic coastal village finds something sinister in the local estuary before three young women in London receive a mysterious text message from one of their friends. The women had been at boarding school together and were known for playing the "lying game," telling lies to fellow boarders and teachers, before they were expelled following the death of the school’s eccentric art teacher.

The John Le Carré spy drama The Night Manager is moving closer towards a second series after signing British writer Matthew Orton to pen The Ink Factory-produced series. Night Manager director Susanne Bier also said in March that a follow-up was "slowly being developed" but that the creators were taking their time to make sure series two lives up to the first series. The original series featured Tom Hiddleston as enigmatic Jonathan Pine, who goes undercover to expose billionaire arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie, and Hiddleston has said he would consider featuring in a second series.

CBS has given a 13-episode straight-to-series order to Blood & Treasure, an hourlong serialized action-adventure series for premiere in summer 2019. Written by Matt Federman and Stephen Scaia, Blood & Treasure centers on a brilliant antiquities expert and a cunning art thief who team up to catch a ruthless terrorist who funds his attacks through stolen treasure. As they crisscross the globe hunting their target, they unexpectedly find themselves in the center of a 2,000-year-old battle for the cradle of civilization.

CBS' live-streaming service All Access is moving from space to storybooks with Tell Me a Story, which takes the world’s most beloved fairy tales and reimagines them as a dark and twisted psychological thriller. The show is set in modern-day New York City, with the first season of the drama interweaving the stories "The Three Little Pigs," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" into "an epic and subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge and murder."

NBC has put in development drama Spirit of the Law, based on the life of California pastor Kalvin Cressel, who was a federal special agent for 30 years. The series would follow Cressel as he works on dangerous cases during the week, including going undercover, coming back to his flock on Sunday at what used to be the toughest church in all of Compton when the city was torn by gang violence.

Showtime has put in development Kilroy County, a drama based on the Dutch series Holland’s Hoop. It centers on Simon, a forensic psychiatrist struggling to treat the criminally insane at a high security facility near Chicago. When his estranged father dies, Simon hopes the ensuing visit to the family farm will allow him to confront issues in his marriage and with his own children. But the more pressing problem is that one of his former patients, Dennis, a dangerous but extremely charming psychopath, has followed them there.

John Stamos is set for a key recurring role opposite Penn Badgley and Elizabeth Lail in Lifetime’s straight-to-series psychological thriller drama You. Written by Berlanti and Gamble based on Caroline Kepnes’ best-selling novel, You is described as a 21st century love story that asks, "What would you do for love?" When a brilliant bookstore manager Joe (Badgley) crosses paths with an aspiring writer, Beck (Lail), his answer becomes clear: anything. Stamos will play Dr, Nicky, who becomes a fixture in Beck’s (Lail) life, much to the dismay of Joe (Badgley). Shay Mitchell also stars.

Netflix is set to launch the Chinese detective drama Day and Night, a 32-part series that follows a detective who attempts to clear his twin brother from a murder charge. After recusing himself from the case, he is hired as a secret consultant by the new investigator.

Just days after Berlin Station had its Season 2 finale, Epix gave the Olen Steinhauer-created spy series a third season. Season 3 of Berlin Station looks set to start streaming on Epix in late 2018 or early 2019, although it's not yet clear who is returning from the series that includes a cast composed of Richard Armitage, Michelle Forbes, Leland Orser, Ashley Judd, Richard Jenkins and Rhys Ifans.

Another series getting "more" is CBS' Sherlock Holmes program, Elementary, which was just given eight additional episodes for Season 6 of the crime procedural, bringing the total to 21 episodes.

As CBS has firmed up its midseason schedule and ordered two additional episodes of its freshman Shemar Moore-starring drama series S.W.A.T., bringing it up to a full 22 episodes.

Netflix has formally ordered a second season of Mindhunter, its crime drama series executive produced by David Fincher and Charlize Theron and starring Jonathan Groff and and Holt McCallany as FBI agents and profilers Holden Ford and Bill Tench.

Costa Ronin is set for a recurring role on the upcoming seventh season of Showtime’s Emmy-winning drama Homeland. Russia native Ronin has played KGB agent Oleg Burov on all five seasons of FX’s 1980-set spy drama The Americans.

Ryan Kwanten, a regular fixture on HBO's True Blood, will headline the upcoming Crackle series The Oath, which stars Kwanten as a dirty cop operating in a department filled with organized gangs.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

On BBC Radio 4, journalist Jonathan Guyer examined the different forms of noir fiction addressing the failed revolutions, jihadism, and chaos in Egypt and "the strange case of the Arab whodunnit."

Authors on the Air's Crime Corner podcast with host Matt Coyle welcomed Nadine Nettmann to chat about her Sommelier Mystery Series, with the debut novel, Decanting a Murder, nominated for the Anthony, Agatha, and Lefty awards.

The latest Crime Cafe podcast with host Debbi Mack featured an interview with crime fiction author Vincent Zandri.

Two Crime Writers and a Microphone hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Vest returned for a new season of brand new episodes. First up was a report on the Bad Sex award (won by a thriller author), celebrating the best examples of bad sex scenes in fiction for the past year, as voted for by the Literary Review.

THEATER

Calgary Canada's Vertigo Theatre continues their Mystery Series productions with The 39 Steps, adapted by Patrick Barlow from the movie by Alfred Hitchcock. The story centers on a beautiful spy who is murdered and how the main suspect, Richard Hannay, must stay one step ahead of the killers, the police, and a jealous husband in a quest to prove his innocence. This two-time Tony Award-winning treat features a talented cast of four playing over 150 zany characters, an on-stage plane crash, handcuffs, missing fingers and some good old-fashioned romance. The production runs through Dec. 16.

Rising star Thom Southerland is directing a new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tony and Olivier-Award nominated musical, The Woman in White for a strictly limited 12-week season at the UK's Charing Cross Theatre. The tempestuous tale of love, betrayal and greed, adapted from Wilkie Collins’ haunting Victorian thriller, sees Walter Hartright’s life changed forever after a chance encounter with a mysterious woman, dressed in white, desperate to reveal her chilling secret. The production will run through February 10, 2018.