Tom Ellis has landed his first major TV role following the conclusion of Lucifer. The actor will star in the upcoming Hulu comedy Second Wife, from Tell Me Lies creator Meaghan Oppenheimer, who is Ellis’s real-life wife. The series will star Ellis opposite Emma Roberts as a young woman who falls in love with Ellis’s character after getting out of a bad relationship. Oppenheimer will serve as the series showrunner, and executive produce the series through her Belletrist banner. Ellis and Roberts will also serve as executive producers.
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While she is Hollywood royalty and a star of big-screen fare, it isn’t unprecedented for Roberts to take TV jobs. She has worked on series like Scream Queens and American Horror Story in the past. Both she and Ellis are best known for genre projects, so having what sounds like a fairly straightforward dramedy will be a nice change of pace for the actors.
Here’s the official series logline, via Variety, who first reported the casting news:
The dark comedy series will follow Sasha (Roberts), who is fresh from a terrible breakup and flees New York to start over in London, where she meets and quickly falls in love with a recently divorced father named Jacob (Ellis). When they impulsively decide to get married, they learn that there’s a lot they don’t know about each other – and they can’t outrun their pasts forever.
Lucifer is in that category of DC Comics adaptations — along with shows like Doom Patrol and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow — which have taken on an identity of their own, beyond the comic book source material, and developed passionate fan bases even among those who are not regular comics readers. The show ran for six seasons — first on Fox, and then on Netflix — before executive producers Joe Hendson and Ildy Modrovich were allowed to bring it in for a graceful landing in 2021. Almost exactly a year later, the complete series is coming to DVD, and the final season is hitting DVD and Blu-ray (although to get the latter, you’ve got to do it through the Warner Archive online).
The series was cancelled at Fox, and almost immediately rumors started up that it would be saved and brought to Netflix. Once it was, it was consistently the most-streamed TV show of the year, every year new episodes were airing. The notion that it would be considered a broadcast TV failure, only to become a crown jewel of the biggest streaming service in the world, seemed crazy — and probably helped Ellis become pretty sought-after when it came time for a competing streamer to cast a lead.
