In Brief: Jessica Simpson memoir becoming a TV pilot, and more

Amazon Freevee has ordered the half-hour scripted pilot Open Book, based on the memoir by reality TV and pop star Jessica Simpson, according to Variety. The series stars Ballers‘ Katelyn Tarver as Sadie Sparrow, “a young singer based on Simpson,” alongside Big Shot‘s John Stamos as Butch, “an older musician who’s tasked with writing songs with Sadie — but soon their connection is much more than that.” Open Book, per the streamer, “follows Sadie’s unexpected journey as she ultimately comes to embrace herself and the fact that her heart inevitably wants what it wants at every stage of life”…

HBO Max on Monday dropped the first teaser for Doom Patrol‘s fourth season. Doom Patrol stars Brendan Fraser as Cliff Steele, Matt Bomer as Larry Trainor/Negative Man, Diane Guerrero as Jane — a.k.a. Crazy Jane, April Bowlby as Rita Farr/Elasti-Woman and Joivan Wade as Victor Stone/Cyborg. Together, they make up what Warner Bros. calls, DC’s “strangest group of heroes.” Season 4, per the streamer, “opens with the team unexpectedly traveling to the future to find an unwelcome surprise. Faced with their imminent demise, the Doom Patrol must decide once and for all which is more important: their own happiness or the fate of the world?”…(Trailer contains censored and uncensored profanity.)

Eileen Ryan, a Broadway, film and TV actress who performed in collaborations with her late husband, actor-director Leo Penn, and her son, two-time Oscar-winner Sean Penn, died Sunday at her home in Malibu, a publicist tells The Hollywood Reporter. She was 94. Ryan gave up acting career to become a full-time mother, but eventually returned for projects such as 1986’s At Close Range, where she played the grandmother of characters portrayed by Sean and her youngest son Chris, that latter of whom died in 2006. She also had another son, composer-songwriter Michael Penn…

Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Michelle Yeoh, Jude Hill and Kelly Reilly have been tapped to star in his latest Agatha Christie adaptation for 20th Century Studios, A Haunting in Venice, according to Deadline. The studio describes the adaptation as an “unsettling supernatural-thriller” that follows a now retired Hercule Poirot “living in self-imposed exile in the world’s most glamorous city.” He “reluctantly attends a séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo… [where] “one of the guests is murdered” and “the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.” Production is set to begin Oct. 31…