Bullet Points: Rachel Maddow's Hiatus, Jennifer Garner's Return to TV, and Parker Posey to 'The Walking Dead' Universe

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 2, 2022 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 2, 2022 |

— Jennifer Garner is heading back to television, taking a role as a regular on Starz’s reboot of Party Down, where she will play a producer in a relationship with Adam Scott’s character (CNN suggests this is her first “major” TV role since Alias, which is some real Camping erasure (which is fine by me, honestly).

— Our friend Rawson Thurber (Dodgeball, Red Notice), who has been doing some weird stuff to his body lately, will be overseeing a Dungeouns and Dragons television series. He claims he grew up a big fan, but those abs betray him!

So deeply thrilled about this. Grew up playing the pnp version (lvl 13 lawful good paladin, holla!), enjoyed the heck outta @DDOUnlimited — learned to tell stories through (always) being the DM. Boyhood dreams do come true, ya’ll. Can’t wait to get cracking. https://t.co/ZkBXr5mkoX

— Rawson Thurber (@RawsonThurber) February 1, 2022

— Ernie Hudson joins Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Cheech Marin, and Matt Cook in Bobby Farrelly’s Champions, which is about a hotheaded minor league basketball coach forced to coach a Special Olympics team when he is sentenced to community service. Huh.

— Danai Gurira will be playing the title character in Richard III for New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park this summer. Damn right.

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt will follow up his role as one cult leader — the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, in Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber — with the role as another cult leader, Jim Jones, in a movie about the Jonestown Massacre. Chloë Grace Moretz also stars, as someone who rose in the ranks of Jones’ cult and managed her way into his inner circle. White Night will be directed by Anne Sewitsky (Happy, Happy).

— AMC is determined to keep me in The Walking Dead universe, announcing that Terry Crews, Parker Posey, Jillian Bell, Anthony Edwards, and Poppy Liu have all signed on for Tales of the Walking Dead. It’s a six-episode anthology series set in the TWD universe.

— I’m not that excited about a television reboot of Flashdance, but I’m a little more interested knowing that Justin Simien (Dear White People) will run it for Paramount+. I’m far less thrilled with a television series based on John Travolta’s Urban Cowboy for the same streamer.

— Speaking of Paramount+, they’ve renewed Mayor of Kingstown for a second season. I liked the series, mostly, although it fizzled in the back half of the first season when it abandoned many of its storylines to focus on a brutal prison riot. It is, at any rate, a solid role for Jeremy Renner.

— Rachel Maddow will be taking a break (until April) from her MSNBC show to work on a feature film version of her podcast, Bag Man, about the bribery scandal that forced Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, to resign in 1973. Ben Stiller is directing. Maddow suggests she may take additional breaks in the future to work on other podcast projects.

— Finally, the trailer for the fourth and final season of Killing Eve has arrived, and it’s almost good enough to renew my interest in the series, which had otherwise run out of steam. It’ll be back on February 27th.