Tradecraft For August 31, 2007

Alex Rider Creator Inks US TV Deal

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Anthony Horowitz, prolific novelist and television writer and creator of the bestselling "Alex Rider" series of teen spy adventures, has signed a deal with Sony to develop a one-hour drama for American TV with Sex and the City showrunner Darren Star. Even though Horowitz may be better known to spy fans for his young adult novels, he's spent years in the UK television industry creating such hits as Midsomer Mysteries and Foyle's War (both of which have aired on PBS' Mystery! here in the US) and contributing to the long-running Poirot series. The writer tells the trade, "Most of the best ideas on television are coming out of America, and if you're passionate about television, that's the place to be." His project with Star sounds like it has more in common with his UK TV mysteries than with last year's (unwarranted) flop Alex Rider: Stormbreaker, which Horowitz adapted from his own novel. The writer describes the new series as "an American-based police show with lighter-touch elements and an European angle." (Whatever that means!)

Horowitz's seventh Alex Rider novel, Snakehead, is due out this fall.

24 Cast Additions

Janeane Garofalo, Jeffrey Nordling and Star Trek: Enterprise's John Billingsley have all joined the cast of 24 for the upcoming seventh season, says The Hollywood Reporter. Garofalo will play "a government agent who is part of the team investigating the crisis befalling Jack Bauer and company in the upcoming season." That sentence alone sounds almost convoluted enough to have come from the 24 writers' room! The Reporter points out that Garofalo is a notorious leftie, and 24 showrunner Joel Surnow an equally notorious "right-wing nutjob" (as he describes himself), so the pair make strange bedfellows. Oddly enough, though, I suspect that people with different political leanings have managed to work together before, even in Hollywood...