Peacock bags Departure, international titles

Archie Panjabi and Christopher Plummer in Departure

Peacock, the new SVoD service from Comcast, has picked up an original Canadian/UK drama series starring Archie Panjabi and Christopher Plummer for a September debut.

Departure (6×60’) is from Starlings Television and Corus Entertainment, produced by Shaftesbury in Canada and the UK’s Greenpoint Productions. It was commissioned by Canada’s Global TV and Starlings TV oversees global distribution.

As well as Emmy winner Panjabi (The Good Wife) and Oscar winner Plummer (Knives Out), the show also stars Kris Holden-Reid (Umbrella Academy), Rebecca Liddiard (Run This Town), Tamara Duarte (Longmire), Mark Rendall (Versailles), Peter Mensah (Midnight, Texas) and Sasha Roiz (Suits).

The Peacock deal was brokered by Starlings TV president Chris Philip and Starlings Entertainment CEO Karine Martin, who are exec producers on the series alongside Shaftesbury’s Christina Jennings and Scott Garvie, series director TJ Scott and writer Malcolm MacRury.

The series is about the search for a missing passenger plane and was picked up by Peacock ahead of the SVoD service’s debut in the US today, going up against SVoD rivals like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and Hulu.

Peacock parent NBCUniversal pre-bought the series to air on Universal TV in the UK and Germany and 13th Street in France and Spain, as well as on its Universal TV channel in Africa and 13th Street in Poland. M6 in France also has the show.

Among the other new September titles for Peacock is AP Bio, a drama from Broadway Video, Sethmaker Shoemeyers Productions and Universal Television about a disgraced Harvard philosophy scholar who returns to small-town Ohio as a teacher.

There’s also Five Bedrooms, an Australian drama about five singletons who meet at a wedding and decide to move in together. It is produced by Hoodlum Entertainment with finance from Film Victoria, Sky Studios, Network Ten and Screen Australia.

Hitmen, meanwhile, is a UK series from Tiger Aspect in association with Sky Studios. Distributed by NBCUniversal Global Distribution, the Sky 1 show stars Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins as professional assassins.

These international titles join the nine Peacock originals and other titles from NBCU’s other channels launching on the service today in the US.