TV Bits: ‘Star Trek: Picard’, ‘Promised Neverland’, ‘Harlots’, and More

In this edition of TV Bits:

• Sir Patrick Stewart talks about the second season of Star Trek: Picard
• The Hulu series Harlots has been cancelled
• Netflix has taken down four shows overseas after racial controversies
• A streaming adaptation of the manga series Promised Neverland is being developed for Amazon Prime Video.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finds at least one director, and he’s a familiar face in the Trek universe
• One Day at a Time is getting an animated special next week, and you can see the first look here

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the newly-announced spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery, will have a familiar face behind the camera: Jonathan Frakes, who played William T. Riker on The Next Generation and has directed more Star Trek series than anyone else. (He also has two Trek movies under his belt.) Speaking with SyFy Wire, he talked about his interactions with the cast of Strange New Worlds:

“I’ve had great experiences with all three of them. Anson [Mount] and I worked through finding Captain Pike. And Ethan [Peck] and I worked through finding who Spock was. And the mantle of Spock, in particular, was so complicated and so emotionally taxing and was such huge shoes to fill, and Ethan felt it. Rebecca [Romijn] and I have a long relationship from back on The Librarians, and we have a fabulous working shorthand, so it will be great getting back to the floor with three old friends.”

Speaking of Trek, let’s check in on Patrick Stewart, who’s back in the spotlight with Star Trek: Picard. In a recent discussion with LA Times’ The Envelope, Stewart spoke about how the dynamic behind the scenes will alter the second season:

“There was no socializing [between the actors] for the first five months — we were shooting. When we came to the end of the [season], we had promotional activities to engage with and we were traveling together on airplanes and got to know one another so much better. This is going to be a new element in Season 2, that there is a lot of mutual respect everywhere. If you know you can take risks, and there is a network around you that if you crash land, they will catch you, it’s a wonderful feeling. That’s how I feel now. I feel safe.”

As protests supporting Black Lives Matter continue across the globe, Netflix has quietly removed four shows by Australian comedian Chris Lilley from its Australia and New Zealand services. The streaming platform has not commented on why, but Deadline says it’s because the four shows – Angry Boys, Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes, and Jonah From Tonga – “featur[e] characters that have in the past sparked questions over racial discrimination,” including Lilley wearing blackface. Additionally, Netflix has also removed British comedy The League of Gentlemen from its library after it featured the blackface character Papa Lazarou. This is obviously a topic that sparks a lot of discussion, and it should be interesting to see exactly where Netflix draws the line. Is this part of a wave of removals yet to come?

Hulu has officially cancelled its period drama Harlots, which ran for three seasons and the revenge series Reprisal, which only ran for one.

Heroes‘ Masi Oka and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse co-writer/co-director Rodney Rothman are teaming up to executive produce a Promised Neverland series adaptation of the popular manga for Amazon Prime Video. Meghan Malloy (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) is writing the pilot, which centers on a group of kids who discover their orphanage is harboring a dark secret – so they plan to bust out.

And finally, here’s the first look at next week’s animated episode of the heartwarming family sitcom One Day at a Time, which is titled “The Politics Episode” and premieres on Tuesday, June 16, 2020 on Pop TV at 9:30 P.M. ET/PT. Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda is lending his voice to a character in a guest role for the first time, and guests Melissa Fumero (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and singer Gloria Estefan will be a part of this episode as well.

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