How ‘White Lotus’ Composer Reimagined Themes for Second Season Through an Italian Lens

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “The Twelve,” an award-winning Australian crime drama series, has been greenlighted for a second season. It is backed by the Foxtel group and its streaming brand Binge. The show follows a controversial murder trial seen through the lens of the jurors, twelve ordinary Australians who are facing their own realities and struggles. The first season received ten nominations, and won three AACTA Awards in 2022 including best miniseries. In recent days, it became the most nominated drama series at the 63rd TV Week Logie Awards. Season two of “The Twelve” will be eight 1-hour episodes written by Sarah Walker, Anchuli Felicia King, Anya Beyersdorf and Anna Barnes. Local authorities in Western Australia described it as the state’s “biggest-ever screen production,” but divulged no specifics on budget. Filming will take place in the Wheatbelt and Metropolitan regions and create over 100 local jobs, the state government said.

Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page features 10 standout drama series scripts in 2023 Emmy contention. It showcases the critical role writer’s work plays in a show’s success. All materials (the script and writers intro) were submitted before the WGA strike began on May 2.

The father of a student brutally stabbed to death by a 'coward' armed with a 13-inch 'mafia stiletto' weapon has called for a crackdown on knife crime. Jason O'Connor said the 15 year sentence handed to his son's killer 'does not reflect the magnitude of the crime'.

The war in the kitchen is over, for now.  Season 2 of FX’s “The Bear” is not about head chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), his co-owner cousin Richie (Eben Moss-Bachrach), and sous chef Sydney (by long-reigning series MVP Ayo Edibiri) commandeering a lively Chicago beef kitchen as if it were a battleship, ordering their fellow chefs to fire up every chicken they’ve got or to make giardiniera from scratch.

The White Lotus perceived her character Portia as a villain.Richardson played Tanya’s (Jennifer Coolidge) young assistant in season 2 of Mike White’s hit HBO series, which aired late last year to critical acclaim.The role ended up being Richardson’s most high-profile to date, and, speaking on the Just For Variety podcast, she admitted that the spotlight took some getting used to, especially when Portia was criticised by some for seeming entitled or spoiled.“I just hadn’t been in that situation before, so I did get sad,” Richardson says. “There was probably the first couple of episodes where I was seeing some things and reactions to things with Portia and me that I was taking personally or I wasn’t fully sure how to take it or how to process it.”[via Variety]She grew to realise that it was a good thing people were talking about the show in such detail.

With “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny,” Mads Mikkelsen plays yet another bad guy in a blockbuster. This time, he’s Jürgen Voller, an ex-Nazi physicist on the hunt for an artifact Harrison Ford‘s Jones also wants to find.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent “Prisma,” the groundbreaking Amazon Italian original series centered around identical adolescent teen twins who challenge gender norms in different ways, has been renewed for a second season. The second installment of the show is being financed and distributed under a different business model than the first season with Germany’s Beta Film now coming on board as a co-financier and international distributor outside Italy. Shooting is underway in and around the city of Latina, just south of Rome, on “Prisma” season two with director Ludovico Bessegato back at the helm. Bessegato, who previously gained local prominence as showrunner of “Skam Italia” – the hit Italian adaptation of the Nordic young adult drama – also serves as writer of “Prisma” 2. He is now working with Francesca Scialanca following his collaboration with writer Alice Urciuolo on the first installment that launched last year from the Locarno Film Festival.

Editor’s note: The following interviews were done outside of the FYC event series, as there was no panel or screening.

On their latest shows, Brett Goldstein and Theo James have created characters who unpeel deeper truths beyond their hunky appearances. Goldstein, who’s won two Emmys for portraying soccer player and coach Roy Kent on “Ted Lasso,” returned for the Apple TV+ comedy’s third season. (He’s also a co-creator and writer on “Shrinking,” about a therapist played by Jason Segel.) James joined the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” set in Italy and from creator Mike White, as a chiseled, privileged vacationer. THEO JAMES: How did you end up writing for “Ted Lasso”? BRETT GOLDSTEIN: I’d done a pilot for Bill Lawrence. The pilot didn’t get picked up, but we stayed in touch, and he knew I was a writer as well as an actor. When people ask me for advice, I’m always like, there’s no magic phone call. It doesn’t happen. But I did get a magic phone call here, from Bill, out of the blue, saying, “I think you’d be good for this football show.”

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Physical 100,” the first unscripted Korean show to top Netflix’s non-English global charts, is being given a second season. The show falls between a talent contest and a survival competition with 100 contestants, including Olympians, professional fighters, bodybuilders and former soldiers, through a series of quests to challenge their strength, endurance, agility, balance and willpower, and to develop the perfect physique. Controversially it mixed men and women and amateurs and professionals. The show incorporated a plaster cast of each contestant’s torso. This was destroyed with a sledgehammer when they were eliminated.

No, we didn’t ask Leo Woodall about the “scene” in “The White Lotus” season two. Maybe we should have.

The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge could “absolutely” get her own spin-off series, according to the show’s creator.Coolidge starred as Tanya McQuoid in the two seasons of the hit HBO show, the only character to carry over between both season one and two.Tanya met her death at the end of season two, but creator Mike White has said that there is the possibility of a prequel series focusing on the character.“I absolutely think that’s possible,” White told press at the Vivid Sydney Festival this weekend (June 10), as reported by Deadline.“We were just talking about that. It’s a funny idea,” he added, discussing the potential joy of “making Jennifer 20 years younger” to become a younger version of Tanya.“That would be fun too,” White added.

Jennifer Coolidge the huge success of two seasons of “The White Lotus” represents both a huge career revival and a hard act to follow. “I have to move on,” Coolidge told fans in Sydney, Australia, this weekend. “Offers have come in and I would love to do a film next, but ‘The White Lotus’ holds this very high bar, so it will be hard to choose.” Coolidge and the show’s creator, writer and director Mike White were in Australia’s biggest city for Vivid Talks, part of 23-day Vivid Sydney, the largest festival in Australia. Their 90 minute “Conversation” was attended by a sold-out crowd of 9,000 at Sydney’s Aware Super Theatre stadium.

Elizabeth Olsen and Meghann Fahy deliver two of the most nuanced performances of the Emmy season, both playing complicated women who are wives and mothers. In “Love & Death,” Olsen’s Candy Montgomery is based on a real housewife in late-1970s Texas, who out of boredom instigates an affair with Allan (Jesse Plemons), a member of her church — an illicit assignation that eventually leads to Candy being on trial for murdering Allan’s wife, Betty (Lily Rabe). In a very different setting, Season 2 of Mike White’s “The White Lotus,” Fahy plays Daphne, a character on a luxury Sicilian vacation with her husband, Cameron (Theo James), and another couple: Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza). As the tension among the four escalates, it’s both sexual and violent — and oddsmakers were entirely wrong about the identity of the dead body in the season-premiere flashback.

Jennifer Coolidge is taking over Australia!

Next stop for HBO’s “The White Lotus” series could be Australia, creator Mike White said

The stars came out in force for Chanel’s Through Her Lens Program lunch during the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival held at Odeon on Friday (June 9) in New York City.

The White Lotus season three.In the finale of the show’s second season, Tanya (Coolidge) goes on a shooting spree aboard a yacht against a group hired by her husband Greg (Jon Gries) to kill her. Following the massacre, Tanya accidentally falls overboard and dies when trying to escape.Speaking to Variety, Coolidge explained that she hopes there’s some “comeuppance” for Greg in the next season.“My hope for Jon is that he’s not finished with Greg,” Coolidge said. “I hope there’s some comeuppance for evil Greg.

Jennifer Coolidge’s award-winning portrayal of Tanya McQuoid in “The White Lotus” may have met her untimely demise in the second season’s finale, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to bid farewell to the scene-stealing character.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jennifer Coolidge will not be starring in “The White Lotus” Season 3, as series creator Mike White killed off her beloved character Tanya is the finale of the second season, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready for Tanya’s story to end. Tanya’s husband, Greg (Jon Gries), is still alive after trying to orchestrate her death in Italy in a power move to inherent her fortune. During a conversation with “The Bear” star Jeremy Allan White as part of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Coolidge revealed she wants Greg back for “The White Lotus” Season 3 so that Tanya can indirectly get her revenge. “My hope for Jon is that he’s not finished with Greg,” Coolidge said. “I hope there’s some comeuppance for evil Greg. I think he should, I don’t know, end up in a meat-grinding machine.”