Originally posted Thursday, February 6, 2020 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
OWN has decided to retire Tyler Perry's drama "If Loving You Is Wrong" after five seasons.
The final season will return Tuesday, March 10 at 10 p.m.
OWN said in a press release that “some long-awaited answers to viewers’ burning questions” and will include “life-changing catastrophes that will leave the town reeling and changed forever.”
The show about five couples living on the same street debuted on OWN in 2014.
After working for OWN for several years, Perry signed a long-term deal with Viacom in 2017 to produce new content for BET and other VIacom properties like Nickelodeon.
This leaves just one Perry production on OWN: the soapy drama “The Haves and the Have Nots,” the network’s most successful show to date.
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Speaking of Perry, the busy mogul is reviving “House of Payne” on BET eight years after the show was retired on TBS.
The family sitcom, which ran 254 episodes from 2006 to 2012, has special meaning to Perry because it was his first foray into television.
Much of the original cast will be back as well including LaVan Davis, Cassi Davis Patton, Lance Gross, Demetria McKinney, China Anne McClain, Larramie "Doc" Shaw, Keshia Knight Pulliam, and Allen Payne.
It’s set to return this summer.
He also recently shot a pilot for his comedy “Tyler Perry’s Assisted Living” that was greenlit by BET.
It stars two of his mainstays David Mann and Tamela Mann from his "Meet the Browns" sitcom along with J. Anthony Brown, Na'im Lynn, Courtney Nichole, Tayler Buck and Alex Henderson.
Here is the concept for the new show:
In Tyler Perry's Assisted Living, after losing his job, Jeremy (Na'im Lynn), a patriarch of a young family with teenage children, decides to move to the backwoods of Georgia to help his crazy grandfather. Grandpa Vinny (J. Anthony Brown) has foolishly purchased a terribly run-down home for the elderly and he is in way over his head, but comedy ensues as Mr. Brown (David Mann) and Cora (Tamela Mann) show up at the right time as needy investors.
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Stanley Tucci will be hosting a food travel show for CNN called "Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy."
The “Hunger Games” actor will do a four-part series travelling across Italy on a food tour.
Tucci is a foodie who spent a year living in Florence in the 1970s. He starred in the 1996 “Big Night” comedy about two Italian immigrant brothers from Calabria who open a restaurant in New Jersey.
Other upcoming original series on CNN: “The Windsors,” “The Story of Late Night” and “First Ladies.”
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Benjamin Bratt of "Law & Order" fame is joining the cast of HBO Max's upcoming pilot "DMZ" starring Rosario Dawson shooting in metro Atlanta.
Bratt will play Parco Delgado, the popular — and deadly — leader of one of the most powerful gangs in the DMZ. Delgado is known as a magnetic, affable and influential man. Dawson is a fierce medic who saves lives in Manhattan while desperately searching for her lost son.
Bratt shot Fox’s “Star” and “24: Live Another Day locally as well.
The ambitious drama, based on the DC/Vertigo comic series, revolves around a brutal American civil war that leaves New York City as a demilitarized zone.
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