In brightest day, in blackest night, Green Lantern’s getting overhauled

The long-in-development Green Lantern TV series is being overhauled. Based on the popular DC character who featured in that lousy 2011 Ryan Reynolds film, the TV series has been in the works since 2019.

Originally budgeted at over US$200 million for the first season of shows (which is more than House of The Dragon cost), the show has been effectively dumped, with series writer/showrunner Seth Grahame-Smith off the project and a new mandate delivered to bring down the cost of it, while switching the focus of the series from Green Lanterns Alan Scott and Guy Gardner to John Stewart (that's the African American Green Lantern the kids who watched the early 00s Justice League cartoon know).

The cost of pre-production on the show is expected to be included in the $2 billion worth of tax write-downs Warner Bros Discovery are making in regards to dumped content.

24 hour sausage party people

Remember the animated feature film Sausage Party from Seth Rogen & co? The film came out in 2016 and, despite often being laugh out-loud funny, it never quite became the cultural sensation it deserved to be.

The good news, wiener-fans, is that the Sausage Party continues on by way of a new Amazon Prime Video series that has just been announced.

Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, David Krumholtz, and Edward Norton will reprise their roles from the film, with Will Forte, Sam Richardson, Natasha Rothwell, and Yassir Lester joining the show. Is this Ed Norton's first TV show?

From the media release, Seth Rogen:

Film used to be the superior art form to television, and we humbly reached the pinnacle of what can be achieved with film in our remarkable opus, Sausage Party. But now that film is completely dead and TV is the forever-king of entertainment, we’ve decided to continue the epic adventures of our culinary crew in the soon-to-be-legendary televised masterpiece Sausage Party: Foodtopia.

Time to watch Lilyhammer in your Netflix queue

If, like me, you have had Netflix's first ever original series Lilyhammer sitting in your queue for all of these years, you had better hurry up and watch it. The show debuted on Netflix Feb 4, 2012 and the streamer had a ten-year hold on the show which expires next month.

Netflix opted not to renew the licence.

You may well see Lilyhammer pop up on another streaming service. Or maybe you should finally press play on the show.

TikTok actor noticed by Hollywood

How's this for a good/great news story: TikToker Josh Nalley spent a year posting videos of him playing dead on the Chinese-owned social video platform. Every day he would post a video of him playing dead with a caption marking the number of days “of playing un-alive until I’m cast in a move or TV show as an un-alive body.”

Nalley has now been noticed by CSI: Vegas where he will play the body of a corpse in the background. If he's good, maybe he'll one day get cast as the primary corpse on the morgue.

The painfully unfunny Netflix sitcom The Upshaws has been given a third season. Read: Deadline
Replace Walter Matthau with a divorced mother as coach and you have the premise for the new Bad News Bears TV series in development. Can you believe this marks the first reference to Walter Matthau in this newsletter? Me neither. Read: TV Line
Oct 26 marked the 40th anniversary of the debut of the very good hospital drama St Elsewhere. You can read THR's review of it here.
RIP Jules Bass, the stop-motion animation director who created all of those iconic Rankin-Bass TV specials with his partner Arthur Rankin. Read: THR
CNN chief Chris Licht has sent out a memo to staff warning them of job cuts in the coming weeks. Read: THR
Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone prequel series 1923 (starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren) will be expanded from one to two 8-episode seasons. Read: Deadline

Poker Face, the new murder-mystery-of-the-week detective show starring Natasha Lyonne and created by Rian Johnson debuts on Peacock Jan 26.