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The 2023 class of mentees for the Black Boy Writes & Black Girl Writes Mentorship Initiative was announced today. The mentees are presented by writer Mike Gauyo, in partnership with Stage 32, and with support from Culture Creative Entertainment, M88, and Final Draft.

The partnership with Stage 32 consisted of a global search for emerging Black writers, which resulted in a record number of applications from over a dozen countries. The outcome is a mentee class of 12 writers.

“We’re thrilled to welcome the latest group of mentees, who I’m sure will go on to do amazing things in and out of the program,” said Black Boy Write Media founder, Mike Gauyo. “I launched this initiative to create a space for Black writers to have access towards a career in writing, not just in hopes of combatting the lack of diversity in Hollywood, but to give these writers a chance at achieving dreams that,...

Cosmos is (finally) returning for a second season on Fox, and the documentary series now has a return date. Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: Possible Worlds will come to the network on September 22nd but the 13 episodes already aired on National Geographic in March and April of this year.

While this will be the second season of the series on Fox, it's the third season overall. The first season, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, aired on PBS in 1980, hosted by Carl Sagan. The second season, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, aired on Fox in 2014.

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Fox has set September 27 as the fall premiere date for its Sunday animation block that includes Season 32 of The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, Bless the Harts and Family Guy. The news comes ahead of the series’ panels at this week’s Comic-Con@Home event that begins in earnest Thursday.

The animation quartet is among the only returning shows in Fox’s fall 2020-21 primetime lineup, which was announced in May. The network built a coronavirus-proof schedule for the new season, relying on scripted and reality series already in the can, from dramas Filthy Rich and NeXt, both held over from this season, to new installments of MasterChef Junior and Cosmos, the pickup of the Spectrum Originals series L.A.’s Finest and wrestling and NFL football.

The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers and Bless the Harts were able to remain in production during the pandemic, making them a go for their normal Sunday Animation Domination bock.

Kasia Adamik, Anna Kazejak and Dorota Kędzierzawska are among the directors who are to receive subsidies from the main funding body in Poland. The Polish Film Institute’s (Pisf’s) second funding session of 2020 was modest in comparison to the first one this year: only five projects – as against ten – will receive financial grants. A further two films, Biała odwaga by Marcin Koszałka and Kosmos by Michał Marczak, were moved to the next session. However, it’s not the quantity that drew the attention of industry experts and the media to the Pisf experts’ ruling. Of the five supported films, four will be helmed by female directors, which is unprecedented in both number and ratio. The Polish branch of the Women in Film organisation has been lobbying for gender parity and increased visibility for female artists for years, and finally it seems to have come to fruition. The only male.

Thanks to “Game of Thrones,” there’s no longer a gap in visual effects quality between high-end features and episodic TV, despite disparities in budgets and schedules. The HBO landmark fantasy-drama set the standard early in its run, winning seven Emmys for bone-crunching battles and medieval world building, and the industry stepped up and has continued raising the bar ever since.

It’s an efficient, global workforce that keeps improving and adjusting, especially during the lockdown, when it was forced to work even more remotely in post-production. Just look at the stunning work among this season’s Emmy contenders: “The Mandalorian,” “Watchmen,” “Westworld,” “Stranger Things,” “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” “Altered Carbon,” “Lost in Space,” and “Cosmos: Possible Worlds.”

“One of the keys now in our industry is to keep pushing the limits of what we are doing,” said Martin Pelletier, VFX supervisor for RodeoFX, who oversaw the complex...

Stranger Things

Rerecording mixers Will Files (War for the Planet of the Apes), Mark Paterson (an Oscar winner for Les Misérables) and Craig Henighan (Roma) all brought feature-film backgrounds to the climactic episode of the Netflix sci-fi series' third season. The team wanted to deliver what felt like big-budget Hollywood sound, and a key aspect of that was conveying scale. "We had a giant monster, and it had to sound like it was the biggest, loudest thing you ever heard," Files says. "How can you do that when you can't rely on tricks in the cinema?"...

We live in a world beset by major problems: the coronavirus pandemic, systemic racism and, as if those weren’t troubling enough, the threat of climate change. But Emmy-winning producer, director and author Ann Druyan maintains optimism about human potential. You might say she takes a cosmic view.

“What gives me hope is that our ancestors had their backs to the wall on countless occasions…and they suffered tremendous hardships and managed to endure and even to flourish,” Druyan tells Deadline. “This is true of our species…We have what it takes.”

She adds quickly that what she believes in is “evidence-based hope.”

“We have the means to get through these terrible troubles, but we have to get our act together,” Druyan insists. “And one of the ways, in my view, is to spread the knowledge of science and high technology to the widest possible public once again.”

Druyan has...

“We’re not inventing a story where we need the most extreme version of what it is that meets our fears,” Cosmos: Possible Worlds host and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said of the vital role VFX plays in the National Geographic series. “We are just trying to portray actual known things that happen in the actual known universe.”

Tyson joined Possible Worlds executive producer Ann Druyan and visual effects supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun at Deadline’s Contenders Television virtual event.

“The biggest challenge is to make science what it is,” Okun says of making the series come alive with VFX. “What’s really important about this is that my journey … is to put up on the screen what they wrote,” he added of the Druyan- and Brannon Braga-penned series, which is executive produced by Seth MacFarlane and ended its first season April 20.

“So, what the effects had to do...