TVLine Items: 4400 Taps Original Star, Kal Penn’s FX Comedy Pilot and More
The CW is recruiting one of the original 4400 for its reboot: Patrick John Flueger, who played returnee Shawn Farrell on the USA Network drama, will guest-star as Caleb, a charismatic figure from one of the 4400’s past, our sister site Deadline reports. Additionally, original series co-creator Scott Peters will direct an upcoming episode of the update.
Airing Mondays at 9/8c, the CW drama follows 4,400 overlooked, undervalued, or otherwise marginalized people who vanished without a trace over the last hundred years and are all returned in an instant, having not aged a day and with no memory of what happened to them.
Flueger currently stars as Adam Ruzek on NBC’s Chicago P.D.
Ready for more of today’s newsy nuggets? Well…
* Kal Penn (Designated Survivor) will headline the FX comedy pilot Belated, from Rescue Me co-creator Peter Tolan, per Deadline. The project follows Owen (Penn), a recently out man in his 40s, and his ex-wife Diana as they attempt to find their new normal and take on new relationships while continuing to co-parent together.
* Gabriel Basso (The Big C) and Luciane Buchanan (The New Legends of Monkey) have been cast in Netflix’s political conspiracy thriller The Night Agent, from executive producer Shawn Ryan.
* HBO Max’s Dead Boy Detectives pilot, based on DC Comics characters created by Neil Gaiman, has tapped George Rexstrew, Jayden Revri (The Lodge) and Kassius Nelson (Hollyoaks) as its leads, our sister site Variety reports.
* Watch a trailer for Close to Me, a six-part thriller, starring Connie Nielsen and Christopher Eccleston, which makes its US debut on Sundance Now and AMC+ on Thursday, Dec. 16:
Which of today’s TVLine Items pique your interest?
Kind of a surprise and a shame that Dead Boy Detectives isn’t keeping the actors who played the characters on Doom Patrol. I thought they did quite well, and that episode really seemed like a backdoor pilot for a spinoff.
I guess they decided to go in a different direction?
It will probably be a separate reality (along the lines of how they made the Titans and Doom Patrol shows separate realities despite both having similar versions of the DP team).
If the new 4400 was any good, I’d actually be excited about PJF’s guest role. I was really rooting for the show, but I can’t keep tuning in to the same bad writing and acting.
The CW ruined the 4400
its unwatchable
I agree, I’ll just rewatch the original and keep hope they will bring it back to continue.
4400 is just… So. Bad. The writing is painfully clunky. The acting is extremely underwhelming. I’m trying so hard because I love the premise and see the potential. Now they’re trying to force Andre and Shanice together out of nowhere. It feels like they have no clue what to do with these characters.
That was the moment I more or less gave up too. It came completely out of nowhere! They could potentially have given us moments the whole episode where there might be hints that they’re attracted to each other but nope. If they’re that careless with romance plots then how could we possibly expect them to provide interesting coherent answers to the larger mystery plot? And the acting is quite poor too, or at least they way they’ve been directed is very poor. Andre could potentially be such an absorbing magnetic character but the execution is just so bad.
Was so let down with the 4400, I was so excited to see it was being rebooted as the original was awesome. However, the writing and acting are abysmal, I mean like so bad it is annoying, rather than boring! Imagine your wife that you have not seen for around 15 years turns up and has not aged a day, but you just think she did a runner on you! And how they are being held prisoner in a hotel, such garbage writing!
I gave up after episode 3, they really made a mess of it and I will be shocked if it gets renewed
The show is so bad. No matter who the guest star is…. not making it any better. Just stop it, please.
This is Supergirl on steroids. 4400 was about 4400 people taken out of space and time returned to present day to prevent an extinction level event from happening in the future. CW’s 4400 is not that. 4-5 minutes of people actually using powers in the first 300 minutes of 5 episodes. 85% of that time is the characters held against their will in a hotel. The racist undertones are glaring. 80% of the cast is black and shows them oppressed by the government and abused by white security guards for most of the show. This show is a black propaganda piece. The CW writers should be fired. The CW exec that approved this script should be fired. This racist show against white people should be pulled off the air. I don’t know about you but i do not talk about how black people were slaves decades ago, I do not talk about oppression of black people, black lives matter seriously? I agree all live matters not just black ones and I am a minority ethnic race who has been oppressed all my life but i don’t cry and make shows to make myself feel better about myself. People really don’t care about these types of issues at home, they want a good story to keep them entertained but for some reason idiots at CW especially think we need this crap shoved down our throats. Look at Supergirl, they did it to that show and ratings from the millions of viewership dropped to under 500k by the last season…then they doubled down on this crap with the 4400…18% viewer ratings with thousands of raters on rotten tomatoes…what does that tell you.