Karen M.Peterson: Last News

Karen M. Peterson Production designer Luke Hull crafted a working city for “Andor,” the “Star Wars” series streaming Wednesdays on Disney+. The show, a prequel to the 2016 film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” follows eventual rebel hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and introduces audiences to new locations and planets. The most ambitious of these is Ferrix, a salvaging outpost on the edge of the galaxy that keeps itself free from the Empire’s interference. The planet Cassian calls home is an arid one, which presented Hull and showrunner Tony Gilroy with the challenge of designing an environment that felt different from Tatooine or Jakku, places “Star Wars” fans know well. Hull, who won an Emmy for his work on the limited series “Chernobyl,” says, “We didn’t want it to fall into the trap of being a town in a desert, or I was quite keen for it not to be a frontier town. Tony was keen that it had a very strong cultural heart. Like you really understood that the people came together, looked after each other there, they weren’t just part of the environment.”

Karen M. Peterson From the start, “The White Lo­­tus” has focused on building characters. The second season of Mike White’s watercooler show for HBO, brought a (mostly) new cast, a new location and a switch from limited series to drama, where it added 23 Emmy nominations to its tally, five of which went to supporting actresses.

Karen M. Peterson For singer and songwriter Michael Franti, the road to “Champions” began with a text message during the pandemic. Franti and his long-time friend Woody Harrelson had talked of making a movie together, but the timing never worked. Once COVID hit, the musician found himself with a lot of time on his hands. “I had nothing to do except sit around and watch reels from the movie,” he tells Variety. In “Champions,” directed by Bobby Farrelly, Harrelson plays Marcus Marokovich, an assistant coach for a minor league basketball team in Iowa. After a DUI, he accepts a community service assignment managing players with intellectual disabilities. Working with his athletes over the course of his 90 days, they gradually break down his grumpy exterior and help reveal his empathetic side.

Karen M. Peterson As the new season of “Ted Lasso” returned to Apple TV+ Wednesday, audiences will see some new faces and places. Season 2 of the Emmy-winning series ended with rising PR star Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) striking out on her own, preparing to launch her own firm. Meanwhile, Nate “the Great” Shelley (Nick Mohammed) joined the Dark Side, as head coach of Rupert Mannion’s (Anthony Head) newly acquired football club, West Ham. Production designer Paul Cripps had the exciting task of creating new spaces befitting characters we love — and love to hate. In early conversations with set decorator Kate Goodman and showrunner Jason Sudeikis, they knew Keeley’s new company, KJPR, needed to reflect the quirky person she is, as well as the confident businesswoman she is growing into. “Keeley’s house is very unique to her style,” Cripps says. “Her confidence comes out through her surroundings, rather than through herself.”

Karen M. Peterson As the new season of “Ted Lasso” returned to Apple TV+ Wednesday, audiences will see some new faces and places. Season 2 of the Emmy-winning series ended with rising PR star Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) striking out on her own, preparing to launch her own firm. Meanwhile, Nate “the Great” Shelley (Nick Mohammed) joined the Dark Side, as head coach of Rupert Mannion’s (Anthony Head) newly acquired football club, West Ham. Production designer Paul Cripps had the exciting task of creating new spaces befitting characters we love — and love to hate. In early conversations with set decorator Kate Goodman and showrunner Jason Sudeikis, they knew Keeley’s new company, KJPR, needed to reflect the quirky person she is, as well as the confident businesswoman she is growing into. “Keeley’s house is very unique to her style,” Cripps says. “Her confidence comes out through her surroundings, rather than through herself.”

Karen M. Peterson Main title creators Mark Bashore and Katrina Crawford were given a unique challenge in creating the title sequence for “The Rings of Power,” a series from the world of J.R.R. Tolkien that would introduce fans of “The Lord of the Rings” to the much older and less familiar Second Age. Bashore credits Crawford with their approach to the overall main title design, saying, “She came up with this idea of portals into other worlds. You have 90 seconds or sometimes less to transport people psychologically into a place where they’re ready. And it’s oftentimes the only thing that lives across seasons and seasons. Everything else changes. The directors, the writers, the shows change, but the one thing is that portal.”

Karen M. Peterson Supervising sound editor Jane Tattersall, sound designer Brennan Mercer and rerecording mixers Matthew Chan and Lou Solakofski knew the stakes were high for Paramount+ series “Halo,” based on the wildly popular Xbox video game, which for years had been trying to make the leap to movie theaters.“There was enormous pressure,” says Tattersall of the series, which is in the middle of its nine-episode first-season run on the streamer.

Karen M. Peterson Working on “Our Flag Means Death,” a half-hour comedy now streaming on HBO Max, production designer Ra Vincent was excited for the challenge of crafting “a theatrical play … on the high sea.”A fictionalized account of reallife 18th-century “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet (played by Rhys Darby) and his relationship with the infamous Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard (Taika Waititi), the series needed to use its sets in ways that typical movie and television productions do not.“It’s less of a major motion picture and more of a theater sports performance,” Vincent explains.  At the outset, Vincent says the team decided, “Let’s build an environment where the cast can explore exactly who the character would be without the limitations of having a seriously preplanned set.” To fashion that kind of open space, the art department needed to make room for 100 crew members and their equipment, while also allowing for the actors and their needs in the moment.

By Karen M. Peterson