The first trailer of Disney’s Saving Mr Banks has been released. Australian Ian Collie from Essential Media & Entertainment is producing the film, along with UK’s Ruby Film’s Alison Owens and US producer Phil Steurer. The film is based on Essential’s documentary, The Shadow of Mary Poppins, which examines Australian author PL Travers and her creative collaboration with Walt Disney on the film adaption of her much-loved novel. Saving Mr Banks stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as PL Travers. The film is released in the US in December, 2013 and Australia in February 2014.
The New York Times Mike Hale lists 34 TV shows to look out for this summer.
LONGMIRE (A&E Mondays ) This dark modern western starring Robert Taylor as a burned-out Wyoming sheriff was one of last summer’s pleasant surprises. As Season 2 starts, Walt Longmire and his combative deputy, Vic Moretti (Katee Sackhoff), are as amusingly irritated with each other as ever.
PRISONERS OF WAR (Hulu -Tuesdays ) The second season of the Israeli series that inspired one of the best shows on American TV, “Homeland,” becomes available online.
WIZARDS VS. ALIENS (the Hub June 1) Russell T Davies, the driving force behind the modern “Doctor Who,” is a creator of this children’s series about two 16-year-old British boys — one a wizard — battling aliens who look like a cross between Klingons and members of the “Cats” chorus.
THE KILLING (AMC June 2) A co-production deal with Netflix saved the show from cancellation, and so Season 3 begins a year after the conclusion of the Rosie Larsen case, with the former detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) working on a ferry dock. Among the central cast, only Ms. Enos and Joel Kinnaman, as Linden’s once and future partner, Holder, return.
THE FOSTERS (ABC Family June 3) The producing team behind the flight-attendant reality series “Fly Girls” turns to fiction with this new teenage drama about lesbian moms raising a family of foster and biological children. Teri Polo and Sherri Saum play the mothers; Jennifer Lopez is an executive producer.
MISTRESSES (ABC, , June 3) In this prime-time soap, based on a British series that ran from 2008 to 2010, extramarital sex is the premise rather than a bonus. Alyssa Milano, Yunjin Kim (of “Lost”), Rochelle Aytes and Jes Macallan are the quartet of friends in this third- or fourth-generation descendant of “Sex and the City.”
BURN NOTICE (USA, June 6) Season 7 will be a wrap for this long-running (by cable standards) spy dramedy.
GRACELAND (USA, June 6) This heavily hyped new series is a crime show that combines “The Real World” (seven strangers in a design-catalog beach house) with “Point Break” (uptight rookie and Zen-master veteran sharing surfing lessons and bonfires). Created by Jeff Eastin, creator of USA’s “White Collar,” it’s based on a sand grain of a true story about undercover agents from different federal agencies sharing a Southern California house.
PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD (Syfy, June 8) This Canadian spinoff of the British series “Primeval” moves the angry-time-traveling-dinosaur action from England to Vancouver, British Columbia, and has an almost entirely new cast, led by Niall Matter, who played the bad boy Zane on Syfy’s “Eureka.”
SAM & CAT (Nickelodeon, June 8) Sam Puckett (Jennette McCurdy) of “iCarly” and Cat Valentine (Ariana Grande) of “Victorious” get their own show in this double spinoff. The preternaturally mature Sam and the ditsy Cat will meet, become friends and start a baby-sitting service.
KING & MAXWELL (TNT, June 10) Jon Tenney, so dapper as an F.B.I. agent in TNT’s “Closer” and “Major Crimes,” goes scruffy to play a former Secret Service agent turned Washington-based private eye on the channel’s latest lightweight summer crime series (not to be confused with “Rizzoli & Isles”). Rebecca Romijn plays his partner-antagonist.
PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER (HBO, June 10) HBO’s summer documentary series begins with Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s film about the Russian punk band and cause célèbre, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
INSPECTOR LEWIS (PBS, June 16) With 27 feature-length episodes, Lewis (Kevin Whately) is closing in on his former guv’nor in the Thames Valley police, Inspector Morse, who logged 33. But this summer’s three cases, which lead off the “Masterpiece Mystery!” season, may be Lewis’s last (signals are mixed). “Mystery!” will continue with the Morse prequel “Endeavour,” a new adaptation of “The Lady Vanishes” and the long-awaited seventh season of “Foyle’s War.”
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TRUE BLOOD (HBO, June 16) The “Peyton Place” of erotic supernatural fantasies enters its first season without the daily attention of its creator, Alan Ball, who stepped down as showrunner after Season 5.
FUTURAMA (Comedy Central, June 19) This venerable (it made its debut in 1999) and reliably funny animated sitcom begins its final season, having been canceled for the second time.
CROSSING LINES (NBC, June 23) The title of this crime drama is doubly apt: The show is about a team of globe-trotting investigators at the International Criminal Court, and it’s an American-German-French production. Donald Sutherland and William Fichtner star.
DEVIOUS MAIDS (Lifetime, June 23) Last year ABC passed on this show, technically a spinoff of “Desperate Housewives,” but Lifetime stepped in with a 13-episode order. Edy Ganem, Ana Ortiz, Dania Ramírez, Judy Reyes and Roselyn Sánchez play an unusually attractive group of Beverly Hills domestics.
UNDER THE DOME (CBS, June 24) A town in Maine finds itself cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome, which is apparently a bad thing, in this mini-series based on a Stephen King novel.
DEXTER (Showtime, June 30) Michael C. Hall’s honorable serial killer reaches the end of the line — one way or another — as this Showtime bellwether enters its eighth and final season.
RAY DONOVAN (Showtime, June 30) Showtime’s new Emmy-bait drama feels a lot like “The Sopranos” on Sunset Boulevard: a Hollywood fixer who lives in suburban Calabasas makes deals and dispenses violence while coping with his highly strung wife, young children, troubled brothers and menacing gangster father. Liev Schreiber leads an impressive cast that includes Jon Voight, Elliott Gould, Katherine Moennig and Eddie Marsan. The pilot telegraphs the ambitions of the show’s creator, Ann Biderman (“Southland”), with a scene that pays homage to a Gould film that is one of the classics of Southern California noir, Robert Altman’s “Long Goodbye.”
MOONE BOY (Hulu, July 10) Chris O’Dowd of “Bridesmaids” and “Family Tree” created this series for the British network Sky; it will have its American premiere online at Hulu. Mr. O’Dowd plays a young Irish boy’s imaginary friend.
CAMP (NBC, July 10) Rachel Griffiths (“Brothers and Sisters,” “Six Feet Under”) plays a summer camp director in this new drama, an American production filmed in Australia.
THE BRIDGE (FX, July 10) The latest dark Nordic thriller adaptation, this serial-killer tale shifts the action from the Denmark-Sweden frontier to the United States-Mexico border. Diane Kruger and Demián Bichir play the lead cops.
ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK (Netflix, July 11) Jenji Kohan, creator of “Weeds,” hops on the Netflix bandwagon with a dark comedy about a Brooklyn woman (Taylor Schilling, of NBC’s “Mercy”) sentenced to a year in federal prison. The series is based on the memoir of the same title by Piper Kerman.
BEING HUMAN (BBC America, July 13) With its original ghost, werewolf and vampire gone, this story of supernatural friendship returns for a final season with several new cast members. (Lenora Crichlow, who played Annie the ghost, can be seen on the new ABC sitcom “Back in the Game” this fall.)
THE NEWSROOM (HBO, July 14) Aaron Sorkin’s much maligned drama about romance and idealism in a television newsroom returns for a second season.
HERE COMES HONEY BOO BOO (TLC, July 17) Again.
TEEN BEACH MOVIE (Disney, July 19) Disney’s latest candidate for movie-musical franchisehood zaps two teenagers (Ross Lynch and Maia Mitchell) into an alternate dimension where they’re inside a beach party movie that looks a lot like “Grease.”
DEBBIE MACOMBER’S CEDAR COVE (Hallmark, July 20) The channel’s first original scripted series, based on one of Ms. Macomber’s series of novels, stars Andie MacDowell as a small-town judge.
UNFORGETTABLE (CBS, July 28) Canceled and then resuscitated, this murder mystery series rejoins CBS’s schedule more than 14 months after its first season ended. It’s a good thing its heroine, Carrie Wells (Poppy Montgomery), has perfect memory.
BROADCHURCH (BBC America, Aug. 7) This contemporary murder mystery set in a seaside resort was a hit in Britain, where its eight-episode first season averaged more than nine million total viewers. David Tennant (“Doctor Who”) stars as a senior detective.
THE WHITE QUEEN (Starz, Aug. 10) The summer is low on new costume dramas, increasingly a staple feature of the TV schedule, but Starz is offering this 10-part British production set during the Wars of the Roses and based on historical novels by Philippa Gregory. James Frain plays Warwick, the Kingmaker, and Rebecca Ferguson, Amanda Hale and Faye Marsay play noblewomen fighting for power.
BREAKING BAD (AMC, Aug. 11) Walter White’s ruthless and improbable progress from high school chemistry teacher to international drug lord reaches its final eight episodes.
LOW WINTER SUN (AMC, Aug. 11) The eighth drama of AMC’s modern period (“Mad Men” and after) is a dirty-cops story based on a seven-year-old British mini-series.
Essential Media and Entertainment has announced the appointment of Simonne Overend as Vice President of Drama Development in their Los Angeles office.
Essential, executive producers of Rake, the Sony pilot for Fox (with Fedora Ent) and the upcoming Disney feature, Saving Mr Banks (with Ruby Films) starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson have an extensive development slate of quality drama and documentaries in the works.
Overend will be working very closely with Essential CEO Chris Hilton and Head of Drama Ian Collie to establish a full drama slate for the US market.
Prior to joining Essential, Overend held roles in film and television development, production and distribution in Australia, Singapore and Europe. She has worked for a range of companies, including RGM Artist Group, ABC, BBC4, Disney, Roadshow, Film Victoria and United International Pictures.
Essential also produced a series of telemovies, Jack Irish, starring Guy Pearce. They are currently in production on The Broken Shore for ABC Australia, based on Peter Temple’s best-selling novel.
They are part of the Essential Media Group of companies, which also involves Essential 11 Television, currently producing Panic Button for truTV.
About Essential Media and Entertainment
Essential Media and Entertainment is one of Australia’s leading independent production companies with a proven track record in high quality screen and digital content for both local and international audiences. Based in Sydney, with offices in Los Angeles and Toronto, Essential is currently producing feature films, television drama, lifestyle, documentary and animation.
Jungleboy’s The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting has gone international. Jacob, the Amish IT guy has been posted on The Huffington Post. See the entire post here.
THE Americans are coming — but the Australians are also heading to the US.
As a number of local production companies merge with US partners or “dress themselves up for sale”, Essential Media & Entertainment awaits confirmation this week of whether its US adaptation of Rake will go to the Fox network.
The prospects are strong, with the pilot starring Greg Kinnear in Richard Roxburgh’s role and directed by Sam Raimi among the handful of programs Fox highlighted to US affiliates in recent weeks.
If it is picked up, it won’t catapult Essential’s principals to millionaire status, but it will show that Australian screen companies can grow by expanding internationally, says Essential chief Chris Hilton.
“It’s an opportunity, basically (if it gets up). It means they’ve heard about us, so it’s an opportunity we can capitalise on. It’s not going to set us up financially though.”
Rather than have US companies finance Australian producers here, Essential’s plan is to “set up in the US and export our IP (intellectual property) to the US and produce it and make it big there”.
As US networks and producers choose local TV series such as A Moody Christmas, When A Stranger Calls, and The Slap, Essential believes it is well placed, particularly with the appointment of Simonne Overend as its VP of drama development in its Los Angeles office.
Essential has a “factual hub” in Toronto where Kevin Healey has a stranglehold on the hidden-camera genre and access to North American networks. Its factual unit, headed by partner Sonja Armstrong and Alan Erson, has a broad range of material ranging from SBS’s hit Gourmet Farmer to big series such as Australia: The First 4 Billion Years, currently on air on PBS USA, and Time Traveller’s Guide. Its kids’ slate under Carmel Travers is also growing quickly.
“We started in factual, (Ian) Collie and I, five years ago, and that’s been the engine room for the diversification which now includes kids and, in factual, more lifestyle and food programming and factual entertainment formats in the US and Canada,” says Hilton.
Armstrong adds: “The more big budget series we’ve been doing like Australia: The Land That Time Forgot and Time Traveller’s Guide and Voyage to the Planets have all sold into America with very high ratings, so we’ve got that reputation in America where we can deliver.”
One novel aspect of its diversification is the story behind the Disney feature film Saving Mr Banks, starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson. Collie co-produced the film, releasing in December, after developing the Essential documentary about Australian PL Travers, The Shadow of Mary Poppins.
Essential’s partners (Hilton, Collie, Armstrong and Travers) are hopeful they can ride the global drama boom while tapping into their factual expertise.
“Particularly with a lot of US broadcasters like History Channel looking for historical dramas like Hatfield and McCoys and Killing Lincoln, we’re well placed in both history and factual as well as drama,” Collie says.
As producer of Peter Temple’s TV adaptations, Essential has also begun developing Jack Irish’s potential as a global crime character. “Peter Temple is open to the idea,” says Collie.
Filming on The Broken Shore telemovie, starring Don Hany, Claudia Karvan, Erik Thomson and Anthony Hayes, concluded last week as the third Jack Irish telemovie, Dead Point, starring Guy Pearce, continues pre-production. And Rake’s Cleaver Greene looks set for an American life. It all looks easy.
The partners laugh, recounting the two years of near misses and jilted lovers Rake had in the US. “We were almost at the point where we said we’ve given it our best shot but for whatever reasons it’s not going to find a home in the US,” Collie says.
Who has missed The Moody Family? Sean, Dan, Cora and Uncle Terry are back, I think. (Unfortunately Gwa Gwa won’t be…. but then again, she might!). The scripts aren’t even written yet, but it is very exciting news.
