Author: Kate Stanhope

October 18, 2016 5:30pm PT by Kate Stanhope

Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

‘The Accountant’ director Gavin O’Connor will helm the pilot.

Netflix and Veena Sud are reuniting.

The streaming giant is nearing a series pickup for Seven Seconds, a racial crime drama from The Killing showrunner, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.

In the drama, tensions run high between African-American citizens and Caucasian cops in Jersey City, where a teenage African-American boy is critically injured by a cop.

Sud would serve as showrunner on the series, which is eyeing a 10-episode order. She will exec produce with Lawrence Bender, Kevin Brown, Alex Reznik and Gavin O’Connor, the latter whom would also direct. Fox 21, where Sud is under an overall deal, will produce Seven Seconds.

Netflix declined to comment.

Seven Seconds is the latest TV project to tackle the Black Lives Matter movement that has taken the country by storm and has sparked protests and unrest in places like Baltimore and Ohio, where unarmed African-American men have been gunned down by police. Empire, UnREAL and Black-ish are just a few of the shows that have touched on the topic in the last year.

The series would bring Sud back to Netflix, which resurrected her crime drama The Killing for a fourth season in 2014 after it had been canceled by AMC. The WME-repped Sud’s other credits include Cold Case and the big screen crime drama The Salton Sea.

For O’Connor, the news comes days after his Ben Affleck drama The Accountant brought in an impressive $24.7 million to open atop the weekend box office. O’Connor’s credits include Warrior, Pride and Glory and Miracle, as well as directing the pilot of FX’s The Americans. He is repped by WME and Morris Yorn.

Seven Seconds would be the latest drama series for Netflix as it continues its $5 billion spending spree on original content. Other forthcoming drama series The Crown, Iron Fist and The Defenders from Marvel, The OA, 13 Reasons Why, G.L.O.W., Mindhunter, Ozark, Altered Carbon and a Lost in Space reboot, among others.

Fox 21’s originals slate also includes American Crime Story at FX, Showtime’s Dice, Queen of the South for USA and the forthcoming Genius for Nat Geo.

Netflix

October 17, 2016 7:00pm PT by Kate Stanhope

The CW

“It has lasting ramifications for the character which you’ll start to see,” showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman says in regards to the developments in Monday’s season three premiere.

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Monday’s season three premiere of Jane the Virgin, “Chapter Forty-Five.”]

Don’t put dirt on Michael Cordero’s grave just yet. Although Jane’s new husband was shot in the final moments of the season two finale, her dearly beloved managed to make it out of life-threatening surgery alive and on the road to recovery.

“This was what was always going to happen,” showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman told reporters Thursday after a screening of the premiere. “I know where we’re going and so I made those choices because they’re adding up to something.”

However, the struggle for Michael (Brett Dier), as well as Jane (Gina Rodriguez) and the rest of the ensemble, is far from over. Urman said she specifically wanted to resolve the cliffhanger in a different way than the season one finale cliffhanger, in which Jane & Co. found Mateo within hours of his being kidnapped from the hospital.

“This event has bigger emotional stakes for everyone,” she said. “That’s the drama of the episode and then the healing and the recovery form such a traumatic event is something that we continue to play. … It has lasting ramifications for the character which you’ll start to see in terms of, when he can return to work, if he can return to work, how his life is changed as a result of this. It takes him into a new direction and there’s some ongoing medical issues that we continue to grapple with.”

Because of Michael’s brush with death, Urman acknowledges that he and Jane won’t have “the traditional newlywed take-off,” as she put it. “At a certain point, we had to take seriously what happened in the finale. He needed time to heal.”

Now that Jane and Michael are married, look for Rafael (Justin Baldoni) to make some big changes in his life as well. “He’s a character that has to move on. I feel like once he moved on, that was going to open us up to a lot more complications and difficulties,” Urman said. “[Co-parenting’s] a lot easier when you’re not hearing from someone with a different opinion. It, to me, opens up a world of possibilities and problems and like real life things that you have to navigate if the father of the baby is not in your household.”

That also means Rafael will have a “surprising love interest” introduced later in the season who has connection to Jane. “The series made a choice to have Jane get married and I wanted everybody in our world to understand what that meant and to have it count for something and I was also frankly sick of playing the love triangle,” Urman said. “Who would he be if he were just constantly skulking around in the background?”

However, the love triangle isn’t dead and gone forever. “Its not over, but it is over now,” Urman teased.

Which brings the question back to Michael. After all, the reason viewers were so worried about his fate – besides the fact that, well, he was shot – is because in the first season of the series, the show’s narrator ominously assured viewers that Michael would never stop believing he and Jane belonged together. At the time, the narrator said, “And for as long as Michael lived, until he drew his very last breath, he never did.”

Urman was cryptic about it all means in the wake of Michael’s shooting. “I think you will have to watch,” she said. “I will say it’s a reliable narrator. And we’re going to be dealing with that.”

Jane the Virgin airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on The CW.

Jane the Virgin

October 14, 2016 6:22pm PT by Kate Stanhope

Scott Olson/Getty Images; Todd Williamson/Getty Images

The hour now will air sometime after the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Law & Order: SVU is putting its Donald Trump-inspired episode on hold.

The network has pulled the episode and will not air the hour until sometime after the presidential election on Nov. 8, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

NBC made the scheduling decision Friday.

News broke Tuesday that the long-running NBC drama was planning to do an episode seemingly inspired by the Republican presidential nominee. The episode, titled “Unstoppable,” sees Veep star Gary Cole in the role of a politician whose campaign goes haywire when several women go public with damaging accusations.

The episode was originally set to air on Wednesday, Oct. 26 — less than two weeks before the election. The SVU episode to air in its place on Oct. 26 has not yet been determined.

The episode was announced in the midst of a particularly damaging few weeks for Trump’s campaign. The former reality show host and executive producer was accused of demonstrating lewd and sexist behavior on the set of The Apprentice (also an NBC show) in a report published by the Associated Press on Oct. 3. (These claims were further substantiated in a THR story published Tuesday.)

One week ago, the Washington Post posted a vulgar Access Hollywood video from 2005 in which Trump discussed groping women with then-co-host Billy Bush. Trump since has apologized for what he said in the video, calling it “locker room talk.” However, his presidential campaign has nonetheless taken a major hit as a result of the leaked footage caught on a hot mic.

Since then, several more women have come forward with allegations of assault, notably two women who shared their story with The New York Times and a People writer who says Trump forced himself on her in 2005. In a press conference on Friday morning, a former Apprentice contestant from season five alleged that Trump had forcibly kissed her.

Trump has vehemently denied the allegations against him and has threatened to sue the publications publishing the allegations (as has his wife, Melania Trump, who was mentioned in the People writer’s firsthand account).

NBC aired the first promo for the episode Wednesday evening, immediately following a new broadcast of Law & Order: SVU. In the promo, the Trump-inspired character describes how “women throw themselves” at him, and he is seen holding a press conference in which he states he has nothing to hide.

Law & Order: SVU