Welcome to the first Cold Case Catch-up post of 2021. For anyone new here (where have you been?), these monthly articles are where we take a look at the on-going careers of the main actors (and a couple of significant players behind the scenes) in Cold Case that aren’t Kathryn Morris. Clearly this site is focused on the show’s lead actor, but we recognise that fans of the show are interested in the others as well. These posts are just brief round-ups, and not an attempt to be comprehensive or up to the minute.
The continuing world wide situation with you-know-what means that production on TV shows and movies is being hit. Newly enforced lockdowns has halted production on many. This will inevitably impact the amount of news we can report, but we’ll bring you what we can.
Starting as we expect to go on, we’ll start with Tracie Thoms (Kat Millar on CC), because she is incredibly prolific, is constantly working, and crosses genres. Tracie reprised her occasional guest role on the Fox TV multi-emergency service drama series 9-1-1. Her Karen Wilson was back in last Monday’s (25th Jan) episode and will continue in tomorrow’s (1st Feb). In July of last year we reported that Tracie would be taking a role in a new series called Blood Relative, also due to be on Fox. It is a crime drama based on a newspaper article about two women combining forensics and genealogy to solve mysteries. News broke a couple of weeks ago that Tracie would not be taking the role due to conflicts caused by the pandemic. Dawnn Lewis (Carmen Sandiego) will be replacing her. Changes in casting like this are very common as the project developers. As far as I can tell the show is still in the works but may have been rolled over to the next pilot season later this year or early next. Speaking of rolling over, there is another project that Tracie looks to have been involved in last year that I’ve only just noticed. Not sure if I missed it (very likely) or it has only recently appeared on IMDb. Either way, it is a short film called BTSD by Terry Gingles. The initialisation stands for Black Traumatic Stress Disorder. The film looks at the effects on the wider black society of violence perpetrated against it. Assuming the film has been made it will probably be submitted to various short film festivals during this year.
A couple of bits of release news for Danny Pino (Scotty Valens in CC). First up, the film Fatale, starring Michael Ealy (The Perfect Guy) and Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby), in which Danny plays Hilary’s politician husband was briefly in cinemas in December and made available on VOD platform in January. If you are in America want to get your hands on a physical format the Blu-ray and DVD versions will be available on the 2nd of March 2021. You can find it HERE on the USA version of Amazon. Secondly, the film Dear Evan Hansen, based on an award winning Broadway musical which we spoke about a few times last year has had a release date announced. It is set for a North American première for the 24th of September 2021. Danny’s role, the husband of Amy Adam’s character, has been created especially for the film and is not in the stage version.
Another possibly example of ‘one that got passed me’ is news of John Finn (John Stillman in CC) in another Irish project. A few years ago John starred in an Irish TV mini-series called An Bronntanas about a lifeboat crew faced with a dilemma after discovering a stash of drugs on fishing boat. John must have strong ties to the old country as it looks like he went back last year to star in another TG4 network show. This one is called Is Olc an Ghaoth and was released as a TV special in early November. If my research is correct (and feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments) the name means something like ‘it’s a bad wind’. The project is a 3 part overlapping drama set during the current pandemic, and explores issues around death and how social distancing etc. impact the normal ways of dealing with it. I am presuming that John’s character of Mairtín is largely seen in flashback form as the first part of the series sees his body brought back from America in a coffin. The weight of casket and body is a factor.
A quick reminder that Jeremy Ratchford (Nick Vera in CC) is guest starring role in an episode of Everyone Is Doing Great was available on the Hulu plaform from the 13th of January. The episode is number 6 and is called “What Are You Afraid Of” (no ‘?’ ?). You can read more about that in the December 2020 CCCC-up.
The mobile-only, short-form video platform Quibi underwent a real roller-coaster ride in 2020. If that roller-coaster was all down hill after a very short climb. It could have been brilliant. It was launched at a time when smartphones with access to high speed networks were becoming ubiquitous. The less than 10 minute long videos with a strong narrative element was chosen to fit in well with people’s busy lives and short attention spans. The platform had considerable creative talent and industry heavyweights backing it. Unfortunately it launched a few weeks into a global pandemic taking hold, when many people had a lot of time at home on their hands, and were willing to binge watch whole series of traditional TV dramas. In December the towel was thrown in to little fanfare. It was a brave venture when we all have access to YouTube, amongst other existing options. The CC writer producer Veena Sud was one of those talents brought in make quality content for the platform. Her 10 part drama series, The Stranger, is amongst the many pieces of Quibi content that has find a new home on the streaming platform Roku. The deal done in early January, marks something of a departure for Roku as they don’t currently do much original content. This expected to change as they attempt to compete with other streamers like Apple TV+ and Disney+.
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