‘Mafia Spies’ Doc Series Ordered At Paramount+ From CreativeChaos, Danny Strong & Matt Jackson

Ed Sheeran has revealed he has no intention of checking out his new docuseries, as the thought of watching it makes him “uncomfortable”.The ‘Shape Of You’ singer explained how he felt about watching The Sum Of It All in a new interview, and admitted that the thought of sitting down to view any of it himself left him feeling uneasy.“It’s uncomfortable for me to watch, I haven’t really like sat down and binged it,” he told Extra (via MSN), later adding: “I hope other people find it more entertaining than I do.”He also proceeded to explain that he was caught off-guard by the style of the show, and wasn’t expecting it to centre so heavily on his emotional state. “I didn’t actually really realise that they were making a documentary on grief and mental health, I thought we were making a documentary on my album,” he explained.“And then I saw [the final product] and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.

Naman Ramachandran Zinc Media label Supercollider has partnered with Idris Elba’s Green Door Pictures and Sabrina Elba’s Pink Towel on documentary series “Paid in Full: The Battle for Payback” (working title) for public broadcasters CBC and BBC. The series (3 x 60′), produced in association with Catalyst, examines the exploitation of Black artists by the music industry and explores what it would look like for Black artists to receive reparations. It documents the extent of the historic injustice suffered by the music industry’s Black artists, including the disparity of profits received by them, despite having created the records that have driven the fabric and culture of popular music. The series will also look at racial inequality in the music industry both today and in the past.

Warner Bros. Discovery is reaching back to its past to celebrate a century of entertainment in a new, four-part documentary series.

Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets is coming soon to Prime Video and it’s attempting to explore the world of the Duggar family and the religion they follow, the Institute in Basic Life Principles.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor The major broadcast networks are trying very hard this year to do what they do best – create franchise drama series built around the adventures of larger-than-life characters. Kathy Bates, Kaitlin Olson, Carrie Preston and Shanola Hampton are among the female actors hoping to click as distinctive protagonists with new series in the 2023-24 season. Bates will bring to life a next-generation “Matlock,” while Preston limns a new chapter for Elsbeth Tascioni, the attorney character she has played on and off on CBS’ “The Good Wife” and Paramount+’s “The Good Fight” since 2010. This is good news for the hundreds of international television buyers heading to Los Angeles for next week’s LA Screenings market. Another welcome development is that the largest media congloms are now on a big push to reopen their doors to third-party buyers, after a few years of holding back the biggest shows for in-house streaming services.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Conan O’Brien’s long-awaited move to HBO Max — well, make that now just “Max” — is finally happening. Max has officially ordered “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” a four-episode international travel series currently in production. Scroll down to watch a first look. The series was set to be announced Wednesday at Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront presentation. According to Max, the new show will follow O’Brien as he travels the globe visiting people he has met through his podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Fan” (in which he chats with listeners from around the globe). In a press release, O’Brien quipped, “My fans around the globe never asked me to visit them, so I did.”

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Tim Burton, one of the most original voices in Hollywood history, is the subject of a four-part documentary series heading to the Cannes Market. 

Fall from grace. Megachurch Hillsong has faced a series of controversies over the years and the new documentary series The Secrets of Hillsong is breaking it all down.

William Earl UPDATED: The network upfronts are once again front-and-center for the television industry as major players gather in New York May 15-17 for the springtime ritual of presenting programming plans for the upcoming TV season. Upfronts are always a hectic time, but this year it’s even more so because of the writers strike that began May 2. Writers and many actors are sitting out the upfront presentations in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America. The promise of WGA pickets surrounding all major events spurred Netflix to make a hasty decision to switch to a virtual presentation rather than an in-person event at the company’s Paris Theater.

Race Across The World is about to crown the winner of the third series - and it has left fans wondering what happened to the stars of previous series.The popular reality series - which has inspired even more outlandish concepts - follows travellers as they attempt to make their way across a part of the world using absolutely any means necessary - except for air travel.This time around, our intrepid adventurers are trying to make their way across Canada as quickly as possible.They’re given funds equivalent to the cost of a one way plane ticket to their destination. For series two, the contestants were trying to get across Latin America - but what happened to them after the show? Let’s take a look… Emon and Jamiul Choudhury Uncle and nephew duo Emon and Jamiul Choudhury proved that they were the most resourceful travellers of them all when they won series two of the show.The pair scooped up a £20,000 cash prize but opted to donate half of it to charity after witnessing some of the poverty local children were living in.

Celebrity documentaries are all the rage these days, and as a recent New York Magazine article points out (a fantastic, must-read), in a feature article about the “murky ethics” in the growing doc and doc series explosion of the last few years, a lot of celeb docs are executive produced by the subject themselves and becoming something of vanity puff pieces or doc infomercials for the subject. But “Arnold,” the new Netflix doc about the legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger, does not list Schwarzenegger as any kind of producer, exec or otherwise, which hopefully bodes well (though you sometimes never know what goes beyond the scenes, he could still have a say or final cut as many do with celeb docs).

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer “The Mandalorian” star Rosario Dawson and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” star Tony Revolori are set as the co-leads in the upcoming western animated series “Ghosts of Ruin.” Per the show’s logline, “In the near-future tech dystopia of San Francisco, ‘Ghosts of Ruin’ is a genre-bending animated series where virtual reality has evolved into Neural Reality, creating a world where video games have been synced directly into players’ minds and are indistinguishable from real life. The series follows a group of gamers on their journey into the world’s first neural reality battle royal tournament game called ‘Ruin.’ However, a rogue program emerges to turn their paradise into a living nightmare.”

Long live “Yellowstone”.

With “Yellowstone” and its many spinoffs, Taylor Sheridan is one of the buzziest filmmakers in Hollywood right now. So buzzy, in fact, that Zoe Saldaña balked at Sheridan’s proposition for her to star in his upcoming series “Special Ops: Lioness.” That’s not something to expect from an actress who stars in some of the world’s most lucractive blockbusters.

EXCLUSIVE: Succession‘s audience continues to grow as the HBO series enters the third act of its final season.

Donald Sutherland has been cast in a key recurring role in Taylor Sheridan’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves (fka Bass Reeves), exec produced by and starring David Oyelowo.

Joe Otterson TV Reporter Donald Sutherland is the latest addition to the cast of the Bass Reeves series currently in the works at Paramount+. The show is now officially titled “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” and is now described as an anthology series with future installments to follow other iconic lawmen who have impacted history in subsequent seasons. The logline for the Bass Reeves season states it will “bring the legendary lawman of the wild west to life. Reeves, known as the greatest frontier hero in American history, worked in the post-Reconstruction era as a federal peace officer in the Indian Territory, capturing over 3,000 of the most dangerous criminals without ever being wounded.”

EXCLUSIVE: Audible has revealed a new slate of UK comedy podcasts, including new series from comedians Daisy May Cooper, Lolly Adefope, Mo Gilligan and Dara Ó Briain.

Joe Otterson TV Reporter “Emperor of Ocean Park,” the best-selling novel by Stephen L. Carter, is being adapted into a TV series at MGM+. MGM+ (formerly Epix) has ordered 10 episodes of the show. The order brings the book’s long road to the screen to near completion. It was originally optioned back in 2001 ahead of the book publishing. Multiple attempts have since been made to adapt the book into a film and later a television series, though none of those projects have moved forward until now. “Emperor of Ocean Park is much more than a murder mystery,” said Michael Wright, head of MGM+. “While it is an engrossing whodunit in its own right, it also explores important themes of middle-and-upper-class Black identity, making it an outstanding addition to MGM+’s slate of engaging and thought-provoking original series.”