The next big TV role for Bryan Cranston will be in Showtime’s legal thriller “Your Honor,” a limited series coming next year from Robert and Michelle King, the team behind “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight.” Also part of the project is Peter Moffat, originator of “The Night Of” on HBO. Production begins this fall in New Orleans on “Your Honor,” which will be the first major TV role for Cranston in a series since “Breaking Bad.”
It was one of several announcements from Showtime in the early days of the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena.
Among the others is a contemporary sequel of “The L Word,” 15 years after it first premiered. Several original stars, including Jennifer Beals, Katherine Moennig and Leisha Hailey, will return, joining a new ensemble reflecting the LGBT community in Los Angeles, said Showtime entertainment co-president Gary Levine.
“We’re going into production this summer, aiming for a premiere toward the end of this year,” he said.
Series creator Ilene Chaikin will return, alongside show runner Marja-Lewis Ryan.
Another comeback is “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels” a continuation of the “Penny Dreadful’ story set in 1930s Los Angeles from original creator John Logan. Paco Cabezas (“Into the Badlands”) will direct.
Also upcoming is an untitled pilot from Gael Garcia Bernal and Jonas Cuaron (“Gravity”), a thriller concerning an undocumented Mexican-America family.
There was a tantalizing look at just the makeup involved in turning Russell Crowe into Roger Ailes for the limited series “The Loudest Voice” about the creation of Fox News that will also star Naomi Watts, Sienna Miller, Annabelle Wallis and Seth MacFarlane.
The eighth and final season of “Homeland” has been bumped from June to fall because of “production demands of our international locations,” Levine says. But he added, “Having now read the first few scripts, I can tell you it will be a breathless, surprising, and moving ride to its conclusion.”
“The Affair” will also end its run this year, but with an apparent time jump. Levine mentioned “surprising developments in the life of Cole and Alison’s daughter, now grown and played by Oscar winner Anna Paquin.” Jennifer Jason Leigh will also be a recurring cast member, he said.
But a 10th season will come for “Shameless” even after the departure of Emmy Rossum at the end of the current season, he said.
The fourth season of “Billions” starts March 17; the second season of “The Chi’” April 7.
Upcoming documentaries include the four part “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men” starting May 10, “XY Chelsea” about Chelsea Manning on June 7 and a documentary series on the producer Rick Rubin, “Shangri-La” shot on location in his Malibu studio, debuting later in 2019.
The one new show Showtime had to present was the series “The City on the Hill,” a crime drama set in 1980s Boston starring a much older looking Kevin Bacon as a corrupt older FBI veteran and Aldis Hodge as a reform-minded new district attorney.
Shooting wouldn’t begin until the day after the press session, but Bacon called the series “reminiscent of the movies that I loved in the ’70s from Scorsese and Sidney Lumet.”
There’s a lot on television, Bacon said, but “nothing that quite felt like this.”
“City on a Hill” starts on Showtime June 16.