LA SCREENINGS: ITV Studios (ITVS) has unveiled its scripted slate being presented to buyers at the LA Screenings, featuring premium dramas Murder in a Small Town and Good Cop, Bad Cop.
From Future Shack Entertainment and Sepia Films for US cablenet Fox, Murder in a Small Town (1×90’ and 7×60’), is adapted from L R Wright’s series of detective mystery novels about a detective who moves to the Pacific Northwest in search of peace of mind, but soon finds the quiet coastal town has more than its share of secrets.
Created by John Quaintance (Will & Grace) and produced by Future Shack Entertainment and Jungle Entertainment for the CW, Roku and Australian streamer Stan, Good Cop, Bad Cop (8×60’) follows a brother and sister detective team in a small-town US police force.
Also on ITVS’s scripted slate is comedy-drama Austin (8×30’) from Northern Pictures and Lincoln Pictures for the ABC in Australia. Set between Australia and the UK and starring Michael Theo (Love On The Spectrum), Ben Miller (Bridgerton) and Sally Phillips (Bridget Jones’s Diary), the plot follows a much-loved children’s author whose neurodiverse son that he never knew existed turns up out of the blue.
Ludwig, meanwhile, is a 6×60’ detective mystery from Big Talk Studios for BBC One in the UK. Starring David Mitchell, the series centres on a man whose identical twin police detective brother disappears off the face of the earth, leading him to take over his brother’s identity in a quest to discover his whereabouts.
From Constantin Film for Scandi streamer Viaplay is Smillas’s Sense of Snow, a 6×60’ drama adapted from Peter Høeg’s 1993 novel about a woman living in Copenhagen in 2035 in a futuristic world dominated by a looming energy crisis.
Based on the memoir of journalist, broadcaster and LGBTQ campaigner Paris Lees is What it Feels Like for a Girl, an 8×60’ coming-of-age drama from Hera for the BBC.
From Easy Tiger Productions for SBS in Australia is Four Years Later (8×30’), a romantic drama that follows two newlyweds’ turbulent time apart and subsequent reconnection between Jaipur in India and Sydney.
Also on ITVS’s slate is the fourth season of post-apocalyptic drama Snowpiercer, produced by Tomorrow Studios for AMC Networks. Due to premiere on AMC and AMC+ this year, the latest season is set more than seven years after the world has become a frozen wasteland where the remnants of humanity inhabit a perpetually moving train, with 1,001 cars, that circles the globe.
Rounding out the slate is police-training ensemble comedy Piglets, from Monicker Pictures for ITV in the UK, written by the team responsible for Channel 4’s Green Wing and Omar Khan, a participant in the ITV Comedy Writers Initiative. The series follows a newly recruited group of six very different would-be cops and the handful of key staff whose thankless task it is to knock them into some kind of shape.
