The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Farewell to ‘Homeland’; ‘Young Rock’ will roll
Upcoming projects announced at TCA press tour also include Zodiac Killer documentary
Here are some news and notes from the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena.
‘Homeland’s’ finale
Cast members Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin are ready for the end.
The actors, along with the executive producers of “Homeland,” appeared last week at TCA to address the eighth and final season of “Homeland,” the groundbreaking espionage drama.
“I don’t have any other reference for this. I’ve never done anything this long,” Danes said on confronting the end. “It’s been so profoundly defining for me.”
In the new episodes, launching Feb. 9 on Showtime, Carrie Mathison (Danes) is recovering from months of brutal confinement in a Russian gulag. Her body is healing, but her memory remains fractured — which is a problem for Saul (Patinkin), now national security adviser to the newly ascendant President Warner (Beau Bridges).
The top priority of Warner’s administration is an end to the “forever war” in Afghanistan, and Saul has been dispatched to engage the Taliban in peace negotiations. But Kabul teems with warlords — and mercenaries, zealots and spies — and Saul needs the relationships and expertise that Carrie can provide.
Against medical advice, Saul asks Carrie to walk with him into the lion’s den — one last time.
In a way, the final run of “Homeland” is coming full circle to Season 1. This time, Carrie herself is the one under suspicion for possibly having been turned by a foreign government. It’s shades of Brody (Damian Lewis).
“The really big idea of this season is that Carrie Mathison steps into Nicholas Brody’s shoes,” executive producer Alex Gansa told reporters.
“Her patriotism is questioned,” Danes added. “That’s probably the most profound insult she can imagine.”
The “second big part” of the season, said Gansa, “is the real resolution of the primal story of ‘Homeland,’ which is the relationship of a mentor and a protege, between Saul (Patinkin) and Carrie. That’s what you’ll see resolved by the end of the 12 episodes.”
When he was just a pebble
NBC has given a green light to a sitcom about Hayward native Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s “formative years.”
Titled “The Young Rock,” the show has earned an 11-episode order. NBC Entertainment chairman Paul Telegdy told a reporter that “every episode features him as he grows up through life.”
Johnson, the son of former pro wrestler Rocky Johnson, led a nomadic life, living in California, North Carolina, Tennessee, Hawaii and Pennsylvania, among other places.
Though NBC provided few details about the show, our guess is that it will primarily focus on his tumultuous high school years, when he had numerous run-ins with the law before straightening out his life. He went on to play college football at the University of Miami.
Zodiac Killer returns
What more is to be said about the Zodiac Killer? The serial murderer who terrorized the Bay Area in the late 1960s has been the subject of numerous films, books and TV shows.
And now an upcoming documentary series on FX is promising fresh information connected to the legendary cold case.
“Oh, yeah, we definitely found stuff out that nobody knew,” says Ross Dinerstein, executive producer of “The Most Dangerous Animal of All.” “… We connected some dots that people never connected before. A lot of new stuff will be revealed.”
“The Most Dangerous Animal of All” is a fourpart series based on the 2014 book by Gary Stewart. It explores Stewart’s obsessive search for the biological parents who abandoned him as a child and how he came to believe that his father — Earl Van Best — was the Zodiac Killer. The series debuts on FX and Hulu in March.
Dinerstein and director Kief Davidson appeared in a TCA panel discussion to promote their documentary. To avoid spoilers, the filmmakers didn’t go into details. But they revealed that much of their new information is connected to how investigators handled — or mishandled — the case.
“Part of the reason why the Zodiac case was not solved was due to a lead detective’s obsession,” Davidson said. “I can’t reveal too much more because, actually, there’s an element in the Zodiac case that’s really not been talked about before that we uncovered and got people to talk about how that explains why it wasn’t solved in the 1970s.”
Davidson went on to say that there existed a “culture within the (San Francisco) police department that you don’t talk, you don’t rat out your fellow officers. I wouldn’t go as far to say that there was a cover-up, per se, but there is certainly information that these former detectives were not talking about that I ultimately did get them to talk about.”
New ‘Silence’
Hello, “Clarice” … CBS announced it has given a series commitment to a sequel to “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Titled “Clarice,” the new series will be set in 1993, a year after the events of the Oscar-winning “The Silence of the Lambs” and tied to the young FBI trainee played by Jodie Foster in the 1991 film. CBS describes it as “a deep dive into the untold personal story of Clarice Starling as she returns to the field to pursue serial murderers and sexual predators while navigating the high stakes political world of Washington, D.C.”