7 Things You Need to Know Today In Order To Be a Productive Member of Pop-Culture Society

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 21, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 21, 2018 |

Here are a variety of pop culture items that might be important for you to know today, as long as you define “important” as something useless that will rattle around in your brain for a few days before it vanishes from your memory.

— Lauren Cohan, who plays Maggie on The Walking Dead, has signed on as the lead in an ABC pilot alongside Scott Foley. It’s called Whiskey Cavalier, and is described as follows:

Whiskey Cavalier, starring Scandal’s Scott Foley, is described as a high-octane hourlong action dramedy that follows the adventures of tough but tender FBI super agent Will Chase (codename: “Whiskey Cavalier”) who, following an emotional breakup, is assigned to work with badass CIA operative Francesca “Frankie” Trowbridge (codename: “Fiery Tribune”). Together, they lead an interagency team of flawed, funny, heroic spies who periodically save the world (and each other) while navigating the rocky roads of friendship, romance and office politics.

It’s not a straight-to-series order, so it’s possible it won’t be picked up. But it is a Bill Lawrence series (Scrubs, Cougar Town), so it will almost certainly get the green light, be awesome, and then get jerked around by the network for the better part of the next five years, get two season finales, and then be resurrected with an entirely different cast. In other words, Maggie is probably a goner on The Walking Dead.

— The bad news is, CBS is rebooting James Elroy’s L.A. Confidential, one of the best movies of the 1990s. The good news is, Walton Goggins is playing the role made famous in the movie by Kevin Spacey. It is hard to be mad at that.

— CBS is also rebooting Magnum P.I., and they have tapped Jay Hernandez as the lead. I know that Hernandez has been in a lot of things since, but he’ll always be Brian Chavez from The Friday Night Lights movie and Carlos Nuñez from Crazy/Beautiful to me.

— Season three of True Detective continues to beef up its cast. Sarah Gadon, who was amazing in Alias Grace and Emily Nelson will recur in the anthology series, which has already amassed a stacked cast: Mahershala Ali, Carmen Ejogo, Stephen Dorff, Scoot McNairy, Mamie Gummer and Ray Fisher. For that cast, I’m willing to give Nic Pizzolatto the benefit of the doubt despite the missteps of season 2.

— As we had all hoped and prayed for, Jessica Chastain is in talks to play the older version of Beverly in the It sequel.

— Sterling K. Brown and Bill Hader will join Charles Barkley as hosts of Saturday Night Live next month. Can we just skip the Charles Barkley episode?

— Finally, Gage Golightly — who has a great name, and was in a great little-seen show on Amazon called Red Oaks — has been tapped as the lead in The End of the World as We Know It based on the 2012 Alloy book by Iva-Marie Palmer.

In the show, when a prison spaceship carrying the universe’s most deadly aliens crashes in Southern California, two millennial women — Kate (Golightly) and Laura, with bigger dreams than working at a kids’ pizza place in the Valley — are recruited by a space cop to hunt down the escaped criminals who have camouflaged themselves as eccentric Angelenos.

The show comes from Rob Thomas (and yes, Gage Golightly fits the Kristen Bell/Rose McIver mold), and will be written by Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacher who — interestingly — are also Bill Lawrence guys. They’re also responsible for the great but short-lived Surviving Jack.