“Our new partnership will help establish The Critics’ Choice Awards as one of the most coveted awards by celebrating the best talent achievements in the entertainment industry with two of the most respected institutions in Hollywood,” said David McKillop, Executive Vice President and General Manager, A&E Network.  “These bi-annual live tent-pole events will be key highlights of the movie and television awards seasons for A&E viewers.”

Said to be the most accurate Oscar predictor, The Critics’ Choice Movie Awards are bestowed by the BFCA, the largest film critics’ organization in the United States and Canada with nearly 300 voting members. Meanwhile, The Critics’ Choice Television Awards are held by the BTJA and represent the collective opinions of nearly 100 television journalists. Last year’s Critics’ Choice Movie Awards were dominated by Gravity, which went on to win seven trophies and nearly double its closest competition (American Hustle); the 2014 Critics’ Choice Television Awards found Fargo and Orange Is the New Black tied for the most wins with three, edging out the likes of Breaking Bad, Cosmos, and The Normal Heart, all of whom went home with two trophies.

The Critics’ Choice Movie Awards typically air in January as an Oscar pre-cursor, while The Critics’ Choice Television Awards air in June as an Emmy pre-cursor. Both ceremonies were previously broadcast on The CW.

Will you be watching The Critics’ Choice Awards? Do you think A&E feels like the right home for both shows? Who would you like to see host the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and Critics’ Choice Television Awards next year?

The post A&E to Broadcast 2015 and 2016 Critics’ Choice Awards appeared first on TVHackr.

Dead Again will reconstruct crime scenes and allow Wood, Schillaci, and Gannon to interview various witnesses and specialists in order to see if they come to the same conclusion as the original verdict. Among the cases that will be investigated are a double homicide that killed a father and son in Georgia, the murder of a young Ohio mother, and the death of a young art student in Texas whose murder was wrapped up in a case of revenge.

This isn’t the first true crime series that Wolf has produced, as TNT is currently airing Cold Justice, which centers on a former prosecutor and a former crime scene investigator as they investigate unsolved murders and reopen cold cases throughout the country. Not only does Dead Again fit with Wolf’s brand of television, it will easily slide into the A&E lineup that includes several crime-related unscripted series (e.g. The First 48, Beyond Scared Straight), so this is a move that feels natural for both parties. Wolf gets to expand his already considerable television portfolio, while A&E gets to work with a vaunted producer and give themselves an unscripted series that could be both important and solid scheduling material.

Will you be watching Dead Again? Do you think the show will go well with the network’s other true crime series like The First 48? What other variations of the true crime genre would you like to see from A&E?

The post Dead Again to Premiere October 2nd on A&E appeared first on TVHackr.

“The Returned has the potential to be one of the most compelling drama series on cable, thanks to phenomenal scripts written by Carlton and Raelle,” said General Manager and Executive Vice President of A&E Network David McKillop.  “We look forward to seeing their vision brought to life on screen.”

The Returned tells the story of a small town turned upside down when several locals, who have long been presumed dead, suddenly reappear. The families of those who returned are left with questions about what happened, what their loved ones saw when they “died,” and how all this is possible; what makes this potentially dangerous is the reaction of the town and how quickly paranoia can spread within the confines of a small town. Until the families can find something resembling an answer, they’re going to have to keep the reappearance of their loved ones a secret, but in some instances, they might not have a choice.

The original series, based on the 2004 film of the same name, finished airing its first season on SundanceTV last fall and ended up on many year-end Top 10 lists. While the second season of The Returned will arrive later this year, ABC has Resurrection, a drama based on a book titled The Returned that has no relation to the French series, and NBC has Babylon Fields, another drama with a similar premise, in development.

The Returned begins casting immediately for what’s likely to be a late 2014 or early 2015 premiere. You can check out a look at the original series below.

Will you be watching the American adaptation of The Returned? How much mileage does this concept have with the original series, Resurrection, A&E’s version of The Returned, and Babylon Fields? Do you think a show like this can find a mass audience without sacrificing what made the original so stunning?

The post A&E Orders American Adaptation of The Returned to Series appeared first on TVHackr.

“The incredible writing team and talented Bates Motel cast has made this series one of the most compelling original dramas on television,” said David McKillop, Executive Vice President and General Manager, A&E Network. “The brilliant twists and turns of the past two seasons keep its loyal fan base coming back for more. We are so proud of the show.”

The network’s highest rated drama of all time, Bates Motel tells the story of Norma (Emmy nominee Vera Farmiga) and Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore), who move to the small town of White Pine Bay where they open up a motel. The series gives an intimate view at Norman’s unraveling psyche and the impact that his inappropriately close relationship with his mother has on his life. In addition to Farmiga and Highmore, Bates Motel stars Max Thieriot (My Soul to Take), Olivia Cooke (Blackout), Nicola Peltz (The Last Airbender), and Nelson Carbonell (Lost).

Bates Motel airs Mondays at 10:00 on A&E.

Have you been watching Bates Motel this season? Are you excited at the prospect of watching Norman further descend into the man he would become? What do you hope to see from the third season of the show?

The post Bates Motel Renewed for Season 3 by A&E appeared first on TVHackr.

It’s rare to see a highly promoted cable drama be yanked from the schedule, especially this early in its run, but it’s better in the long run for Those Who Kill that A&E pulled it when it did. Had the network allowed the show to languish with low ratings, there might not have been a chance for it to build an audience and it would have ended up canceled following its season finale in May. While giving it a relaunch doesn’t guarantee an upturn in the ratings, it’s clear that airing at 10:00 in an increasingly crowded Monday is too much for the young show and that it might be better served by airing either a different time of year or different night of the week.

Based on Danish series Den som draeber, Those Who Kill follows Catherine Jenkins (Sevigny), a recently promoted homicide detective who enlists the help of a forensic psychologist (D’Arcy) to track down serial killers and get closer to answers about the murder of her brother. In addition to Sevigny and D’Arcy, Those Who Kill stars James Morrison (Hawthorne), Omid Abtahi (Last Resort), Anne Dudek (Covert Affairs), Kerry O’Malley (Shameless), and Bruce Davison (Close to Home).

Do you think A&E made the right decision to pull Those Who Kill? Where should they relaunch the show – summer or another night during the spring? Will the show be able to find an audience wherever the network opts to place it?

The post A&E Pulls Those Who Kill, Moves Bates Motel to 10:00 appeared first on TVHackr.

At home, Norman stares out the window and laments that Miss Watson was so kind to him. Norma tries to tell him that he only knew one side of his teacher and that there was no telling what her life away from school looked like, yet when she leaves the room, Norman produces the pearl necklace that Miss Watson was wearing at the time of her murder. Elsewhere, a drunken Bradley nearly runs her car into a truck before stopping on the town bridge and jumping off into the water below.

Four months later…

Business is booming at Bates Motel, as the summer season has brought more traffic down the main highway and caused the motel to be sold out. However, while Emma is still working at the front desk, Norman is busy with his taxidermy hobby, this time working on a beaver. It’s the most sophisticated animal he had ever attempted to do by himself, but Norma doesn’t care; she wants him out working the front desk and doing things that she deems to be normal. When he goes out to the desk, he receives the bundle of letters he wrote to Bradley at the mental institution, all returned to sender, and learns that she’s getting out today following her suicide attempt. While a dead-eyed Bradley is sent home to her mother, Dylan attempts to pay Norma rent, though she rejects it knowing where it came from. He argues that the entire town is built on the weed business before leaving the money with her.

Norma takes Norman driving and becomes the prototypical backseat driver, getting in his ear about being too much on one side of the road and mentioning the possibility of them veering into a tree. Already stressed enough, Norman takes a detour into Shepard’s View Cemetery so that he could continue the process of saying goodbye to Miss Watson. Norma chastises her son again for being abnormal and unable to let go of someone who wasn’t especially close to him and instead of visiting the grave, Norman makes his mother drive them home. The two run upon construction of the bypass, which Norma learns is officially beginning on Monday despite the assurances she received that it would be delayed.

That night, Norma signs herself up to speak at the following day’s city council meeting and reminisces with Norman about the first time they got to flip on the No Vacancy sign and how they want to keep that feeling for as long as they can. Meanwhile, Bradley goes to Gil’s to ask about what happened to her father and who was responsible for killing him; she’s told that Jerry was a heel who only had it out for himself, a bad thing in White Pine Bay. She returns home and goes through her things, including the letters from mysterious B and a hand gun, before having to entertain Norman, who came to see her after writing her every day she was inside. The reason he came? He wanted to tell her that he thought about how isolating and lonely Bradley’s life must have been for her to attempt suicide and assure her that he would always be there to help her, causing her to cry as he leaves.

The following morning, Norman fondles Miss Watson’s pearls and rereads the newspaper article about her murder. The memories he has of the night that she died motivate him to go to her grave, where he sees Gil mysterious hovering over her stone. He takes a few cell phone pictures before being chased away; when Gil returns to work, he mentions to Dylan that they have to get rid of Bradley, as she’s poking around into what happened to Jerry and he doesn’t want her to uncover something that she doesn’t need to know. Another worker comes up to Dylan after Jerry leaves and mentions how Gil hates Jerry Martin for sleeping with his girlfriend Blair – Blair Watson. Elsewhere, Norman goes to Sheriff Romero with the cell phone photos and the meeting turns into Romero questioning how often Norman visited Watson’s grave and if he had ever been to his teacher’s house. He let him go with the assurance that Miss Watson’s killer will be found.

Norma heads to the city council meeting and squeezes her agenda at the tail end, telling those in attendance about how the bypass would harm her business and how the big box stores would take away the quality of the quaint town. However, the council writes her off as stupid and confused and Lee Berman, head of the council, calls her outburst out of line. She, in turn, calls him a dick, upset that she’s now stuck with a motel that she can’t sell and irritated that the PTA mothers in attendance are more concerned about banned book lists than the quality of life in town. After the meeting, Norma runs into Romero, who tells her about the encounter with Norman and encourages her to push him to simply be a kid. When she heads home, she confronts Norman about his obsession with Miss Watson and he confesses that he did go over to her house that night. He describes what happened with the tea and her changing with the bedroom door open, but he doesn’t remember what happened between that and running home. She tells him that he did the right thing in coming home when Miss Watson tried to seduce him, even though he feels guilty over not being there to protect her.  

Bradley goes to Gil’s again and this time, she comes inside. He pours her a drink and she makes it obvious she’s willing to fool around with him, as long as she gets answers to her questions about her father. She gets on top of him, takes her jacket off, and gets an important piece of information before pulling her gun out and shooting him in the head. She then goes to Norman’s in the middle of the night, taking him up on his offer to help her no matter what.

Additional thoughts and observations:
-“This is the road that’s going to ruin our lives.”
-“Yes, I just called you a dick because that’s what you are.”
-“Not easy being a girl without a daddy, y’know?”
-As always with anything TVHackr-related, if you want coverage of Bates Motel to continue, please share the link to this recap on your social media sites, with your friends, etc. I might like talking about any and every show that I watch, but a recap that falls in a forest doesn’t make a sound. Or something.
-I didn’t care for how the episode was structured. The “X months later” device is so lazy and robbed us of psychologically interesting material, e.g. how Norman dealt with the immediate aftermath of Watson’s death, etc.
-Although Bradley’s drunk driving scene was painfully cliché, pretty much everything else they gave her to do was actually pretty strong. The shots of her jumping from the bridge, her body falling through the water, and her walking the hallways of the institution were powerful in their own way, while she feels more integrated into the show than she did for the majority of season one. I hope that the shooting provides her with the type of material that we didn’t get from Norman following Miss Watson’s death.
-Norma looked very Sarah-Jessica-Parker-circa-Sex-and-the-City-season-5 with her new haircut, especially when she was on her bed planning for the council meeting. I like it, though.
-Very little Emma, which was interesting. Since she and Norman are so distant, it makes sense that she wouldn’t be all over the premiere, but I’m curious how their falling out at the end of season one will impact season two, especially since she was such an important part of Norman’s life last season.
-Another gorgeous shot: the semi-overhead of Miss Watson’s memorial, all black umbrellas and rain. Coincidentally, the rain when Norman got home wasn’t my favorite thing, just because it looked like the film was damaged vs. anything realistically resembling rain.
-As much as I would like the show to embrace what makes Norman Bates the iconic character that he is, I think it would be a nifty twist if it turns out that Gil did, in fact, kill Miss Watson and that Norman has been torturing himself over nothing. We’ve seen already that he doesn’t have the most reliable memory and while it looks as if he killed Watson with the pearl necklace, which he’s keeping as something of a trophy, there’s always a chance he snagged it on the way out when he left the house.
-Every television episode needs to have Vera Farmiga calling somebody a dick. Every single one of them. Bates Motel, Modern Family, Sesame Street – just Vera Farmiga walking on screen with a bewildered look on her face to call somebody a dick.
-I also love how she moved over into the driver’s seat at the cemetery. Say what you want about Farmiga’s performance, but she commits 120% and I completely buy this character coming from her. Even at her most outlandish, there’s an earnestness to Farmiga’s performance that keeps everything grounded.
-Norma Bates: world’s worst driving instructor? She put me on edge and I was stationary, so I can only imagine having to operate a motor vehicle with her in your ear.
-Next week on Bates Motel: Norma tries to distract Norman from his obsession with Miss Watson.

The post Bates Motel 2.01 “Gone But Not Forgotten” Recap” appeared first on TVHackr.

The existence of Bates Motel: After Hours follows a recent TV trend where genre shows or cable anomalies try to engage fans beyond the running time of a weekly episode. Currently, there are two other after shows on television in Teen Wolf‘s Wolf Watch and The Walking Dead‘s Talking Dead, but Mob Wives and Breaking Bad had their own after shows in the past, while Sons of Anarchy produced multiple online after shows during its most recent season. In the case of Bates Motel, the after show is being used as additional incentive for people to sample Those Who Kill, an upcoming crime drama that will be premiering Monday, March 3rd at 10:00.

While A&E has had unscripted success with the likes of Duck Dynasty and Storage Wars, Bates Motel is the first breakout scripted series they’ve had, which makes its success all the more important. The network must use Bates in order to launch additional scripted programming and solidify its success, something that will be much easier to do if Bates can launch pretty big and enough people stick around to watch both Those Who Kill and the Bates after show.

The second season of Bates Motel is set to premiere Monday, March 3rd at 9:00 on A&E. You can check out two Bates Motel season two teasers below, as well as a recap of the first season finale here.

Will you be watching Bates Motel: After Hours? Would you like to see more after shows/fan events in the vein of After Hours? What do you expect to happen during the second season of Bates Motel?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4ZK6Ip0JFE

The post Bates Motel to Have a Live After Show on March 3rd appeared first on TVHackr.

The second season of Bates Motel finds the Bates household increasingly destabilized, as Norman has become fixated on the death of Miss Watson and Norman’s brother has arrived in White Pine Bay, stirring up bad memories for the single mother and making her feel even more off-kilter than normal. Season two will also see Dylan further entrenching himself in the town’s drug war, Bradley push herself to precarious extremes in hopes of finding her father’s killer, and Emma’s relationship with Norman complicated by new love interests on both sides.

Bates Motel stars the likes of Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air), who received an Emmy nomination for her work as Norma Bates; Freddie Highmore (Finding Neverland); Max Theriot (My Soul to Take); Nestor Carbonell (Lost); and Olivia Cooke (The Secret of Crickley Hall). New additions to the cast for season two include Kathleen Robertson (Boss) as savvy businesswoman Jodi; Michael O’Neill (Grey’s Anatomy) as the father of Miss Watson; Paloma Kwiatkowski (Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters) as Cody, a small town party girl who befriends Norman; Michael Vartan (Alias) as George, a man who develops a crush on Norma; and Rebecca Creskoff (Hung) as Norma’s first female friend, White Pine Bay socialite Christine.

You can check out a recap of the Bates Motel season one finale here.

Will you be watching Bates Motel next season? What did you think about the way the show concluded its first season? Where do you expect the show to go during season two?

The post Bates Motel Season 2 to Premiere Monday, March 3rd appeared first on TVHackr.

“Glen Morgan and the incredible team behind the Those Who Kill have crafted a captivating drama that we’re thrilled to add to our slate of original scripted series,” said David McKillop, Executive Vice President and General Manager of A&E Network. “As the story unfolds, these damaged yet good-intentioned characters are brought to life by the talented cast.”

Based on the format of a Danish crime drama that was inspired by a series of Elsebeth Eglholm novels, Those Who Kill stars Chloe Sevigny as Catherine Jensen, a recently promoted homicide detective who, motivated by the disappearance of her brother, tracks down serial killers. To help get insight into her cases, she enlists the help of forensic psychologist Thomas Schaeffer (James D’Arcy), as she suspects that her stepfather might be a serial killer and has gotten too close to cases in the past to where she knows she needs a third party. However, Schaeffer too finds himself deeply connected to the cases that he works, only through the killer rather than the victim.

In addition to Sevigny and D’Arcy, Those Who Kill stars Bahar Soomekh (Saw III), James Morrison (24), Kerry O’Malley (Case 39), and Omid Abtahi (Argo). The X Files‘ Glenn Morgan wrote the pilot episode and will serve as both executive producer and showrunner for the 10-episode first season. The series joins a scripted lineup that includes the likes of Bates Motel, which is heading into its second season this year.

Will you be watching Those Who Kill? If you’ve read the Eglholm novels, do you think the television series can adequately depict Catherine and Thomas’ relationship? Who would you like to see stop by the show for a one-episode guest stint or a longer arc?

The post Those Who Kill to Premiere Monday, March 3rd on A&E appeared first on TVHackr.

“The Returned takes an incredibly unique approach, filled with suspense and twists and turns, to the subject of the living dead,” said David McKillop, General Manager and Executive Vice President of A&E Network. “Part mystery, part thriller; The Returned is a perfect complement to A&E’s unique brand of scripted storytelling.”

Based on the 2004 film They Came Back from Robin Campillo, The Returned tells the story of a seemingly idyllic French mountain town grappling with the sudden reappearance of several people who were long thought dead. They haven’t aged since the time of their demise and carry no memory of what happened to them, making their reassimilation into society that much more difficult. Not helping matters is the fact that their resurrection rouses buried secrets to the surface of the town and coincides with a series of gruesome murders that match the M.O. of a serial killer from the past.

Among those featured in The Returned’s expansive cast are Anna Consigny (A Christmas Tale), Samir Guesmi (District B13), Alix Poisson (Micmacs), Laetitia de Fombelle (Lights Out), and Pierre Perrier (American Translation).

Do you think an English adaptation of The Returned could stack up to the French version? How different do you expect the show, should it be picked up to series, to be from ABC’s upcoming Resurrection? Since an American television network is already set to begin showing Les Revenants this year, is an adaptation even necessary at this point, no matter how quality a premise it might have?

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