News

Chris Oliver-Taylor and Liz Doran.

Fremantle, Micanical Media and 2Jons are teaming up for Barons, an international surfing drama for the ABC.

Created by Micanical’s Michael Lawrence and 2Jons’ John Molloy, the eight-part series is set in the 1970s and follows two surfers who become fierce rivals as they create billion-dollar empires, winning and losing themselves along the way.

Liz Doran leads the writing team which includes Matt Cameron and Marieke Hardy.

The project, which has clear parallels to the Billabong and Quiksilver sagas, is in advanced development and the producers aim to start pre-production by the end of the year and shoot in Australia, the Us and Indonesia in April-May.

Lawrence and Molloy secured a development deal with the ABC and partnered with Fremantle. “It will be a highly polished, bold, big budget drama,” Fremantle Asia Pacific CEO and executive producer Chris Oliver-Taylor tells If.

“It’s an...

U.K.’s Fearless Minds is joining forces with Spain’s “Hierro” producer Portocabo and Vaca TV to co-produce high-end historical mini-series project “Garbo, el espía que engañó a Hitler”.

Inspired by the life of the one-off Juan Pujol, alias Garbo, a Spanish double agent who helped change the course of World War II, the six-episode TV drama project is being penned by James Wood, creator of BBC series “Quacks” and “Rev.”

The move marks an early U.K.-Spain TV co-production alliance for TV drama, with international TV giant the Banijay Group also entering as a partner.

“Garbo” was first unveiled as a project in June 2017 at TV drama co-production meeting Conecta Fiction, in Galicia’s Santiago de Compostela, by series executive producers, Portocabo’s Alfonso Blanco and Vaca TV’s Borja Pena.

British producer Jolyon Symonds, who launched Fearless Minds in 2017 as the fruit of a joint venture with Banijay,...

The Quacks of Quedlinburg (which I think I’ll just call Quacks from now on) is a rather unusual bag building and push your luck game that centres on the idea that players are charlatan doctors, selling their wares to the highest bidder. To do this, they’ll use a wide variety of weird and wonderful ingredients – some for taste and some for their potent mystical powers.

Each player begins the game with a handful of volatile components, a single piece of pumpkin and a spider, usually. These goodies are all thrown into a bag and drawn blindly during the first turn. Tokens are placed into a cauldron as they are drawn, with the number shown on the token advancing the potency of the brew (and its associated value) the number of spaces shown. If any player exceeds seven volatile elements in their potion, it will explode, costing them either...

Joseph Baxter May 20, 2019

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels continues the supernatural legacy of the original Showtime series, shifting its setting to 1930s Los Angeles.

Penny Dreadful may have been a beloved, star-studded peak television offering that closed up shop after just three seasons, but the classic-literature-crossover Showtime supernatural series will continue its legacy with a sequel series. The premium cable channel dropped major details back in November about a follow-up series, titled Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.

While the sequel series makes a dramatic shift away from the settings and characters of 2014-2016’s Penny Dreadful, it will have the support of its key personnel, namely creator John Logan, who returns to serve as writer and executive producer, joined in the latter capacity by Michael Aguilar, who's worked on recent Showtime offerings Kidding and I’m Dying Up Here.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels Cast

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels...

The star of new comedy Quacks had his big break in 1981, but spent the period in ‘sheer panic’ watching friends die. He talks about fear, flops and coming back from the wilderness years

In one way, Quacks is a natural place to find Rupert Everett. The keenly British comedy has “something of the Carry On, Stanley Baxter era” about it, he says – a sharp, playful script; a generous, gracious ensemble cast also featuring Rory Kinnear and Mathew Baynton; very accurate historical detail, such as Everett’s thunderous physician trying to cure what sounds like cystitis with the topical application of a baked potato. Really, what could be more fitting? Who else would you cast?

Yet the legacy of his first, dazzling appearance into British culture, the stage and then film version of Another Country, means that if you were alive and at all conscious in the early 1980s, you can...