As the Toronto Film Festival continues to celebrate the best in serialized TV storytelling, the latest series from Mike Flanagan, Shawn Ryan and more celebrated writers have been booked into the event’s Primetime program for September.
In all, 10 small-screen projects were unveiled for big-screen showings at TIFF’s 51st edition, with the shows toplined by Linda Cardellini, Jon Hamm, Carrie-Anne Moss, Gary Oldman and Hudson Williams, among others. The sidebar will open with Netflix’s Below, from creator Jesse McKeown, a six-part supernatural thriller that centers on a seaside town Newfoundland besieged by a sea creature and stars Mackenzie Davis, Charlie Heaton and Josh Hartnett.
And Primetime will close with showrunner Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, a reimagining for Prime Video of Stephen King’s classic novel about a high school girl with telekinetic powers, and with Summer H. Howell in the lead role. The sidebar typically screens one or two episodes and holds informal conversations with cast and creators in Toronto.
There’s also world bows for the American Hostage psychological thriller series, from Shawn Ryan, Eileen Myers and Adam Arkin, an adaptation of the podcast of the same name into a live-action TV series, and the Friday the 13th prequel Crystal Lake for Peacock, about a single mother (Cardellini) unable to get beyond grief over her young, sickly son after he drowned in the town lake almost a year earlier.






