Hollywood, Texas is home to the week’s most notable show business news about Texas stars, Texas stories, and other roles our state was born to play.

In these times of panic and pandemic, people need expert leadership more than ever, which is why it’s reassuring news that Netflix has already renewed Queer Eye for a sixth season. The holistic makeover show is currently filming right here in Texas—an announcement made via a glamour shot of its cast posing with the famed El Arroyo sign in Austin, where production is reportedly already underway.

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The show’s Antoni Porowski, Bobby Berk, Tan France, and Jonathan Van Ness all posted individual photos with the marquee as well, touting their own uniquely Texas-themed boasts. (Berk is “the most fabulous thing in Texas since cowhide,” for example, which any tanner can tell you is pretty darn fabulous.) Porowski also promised to “make queso in each episode,” which suggests the sixth season might find each of the Queer Eye guys instead slowly succumbing to a couch-bound torpor.

Watch Brad Pitt Renovate the Home of his Texan Makeup Artist

HGTV’s The Property Brothers, a.k.a. Jonathan and Drew Scott, will expand their own makeover empire with the April 13 premiere of Celebrity IOU, a show that sees stars giving back to regular people by remodeling their homes, and the regular people just let them, I guess. The very first episode finds A-list actor and amateur architect Brad Pitt renovating the home of his longtime makeup artist Jean Black, a Texan who got her start on the Coen brothers’ Austin-filmed Blood Simple before working on other local productions like Lonesome Dove and Dazed and Confused. But as she told GQ, after meeting Pitt on Cool World and again on A River Runs Through It, Black became a permanent part of his coterie, beginning a lifelong friendship with Pitt that he’s now repaying by smashing up her house. (Then putting it back together, I assume—celebrities can’t get away with everything.)

Dallas’s “Dr. Death” Gets His Own TV Show

The story of Dallas–Fort Worth surgeon Christopher Duntsch is headed to the small screen, after horrifying listeners anew via Wondery’s hit 2018 podcast Dr. Death. Deadline reports that Fifty Shades of Grey star Jamie Dornan is set to play Duntsch in a limited series for NBC’s new streaming service Peacock—a considerable glow-up for the disgraced former neurosurgeon, who killed two patients and maimed 33 others in the DFW area between 2010 and 2013, and who is now serving a life sentence in prison. Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater are on board to play Robert Henderson and Randall Kirby, respectively, the two real-life surgeons who discovered Duntsch’s deadly malpractice and sought to bring him to justice, while AnnaSophia Robb has been cast as Dallas assistant district attorney Michelle Shughart, the lead prosecutor on the case. And This Is Us’s Chris Sullivan will play Jerry Summers, Duntsch’s childhood friend who was left a quadriplegic after a botched spinal surgery.

Patrick Duffy of ‘Dallas’ Joins Justin Long’s Directorial Debut

Patrick Duffy is from Montana, but he became an indelible part of Texas’s cultural landscape with his portrayal of do-gooder Bobby Ewing on Dallas, so we’re claiming him. Still, outside of a few recent guest shots on CBS procedurals and a string of Hallmark Christmas movies he’s cranked out with admirable industriousness, Duffy has been a little hard to find ever since TNT’s Dallas revival ended back in 2014. So it’s nice to see that the seventy-year-old is set to return to the big screen in Lady of the Manor, a film that also marks actor Justin Long’s directorial debut. The supernatural comedy stars Melanie Lynskey as a reenactment tour guide at an antebellum estate who ends up befriending the resident ghost, played by Judy Greer. They then conspire to thwart the ghost’s selfish heir, who’s played by Ryan Phillippe. Unfortunately, there’s no info on Duffy’s role yet—most notably, whether he’ll be living, or dead, or stuck inside some sort of Bobby Ewing-esque limbo.

Woody Harrelson Tags in for Jason Statham

Midland’s own Woody Harrelson has convincingly played everything from serial killers to grizzled cops, with several dim-bulb stoners in between. But his latest role finds him assaying what may be his greatest challenge: making a convincing substitute for Jason Statham. Deadline reports that Harrelson will step in for the “Fast & Furious” star on The Man From Toronto, an action-comedy that pairs him with Kevin Hart. Harrelson will play the “world’s deadliest assassin” and Hart is “New York’s biggest screw-up,” with the two forced to team up after a case of mistaken identity involving an Airbnb. Statham reportedly bowed out of the film over creative differences just weeks before production began, primarily over the desire for it to be rated R. But the film seems to have bounced back quickly with Harrelson, who can surely give the studio the kind of broader, PG-13 romp it’s after, and murder people with a touch more affability.

THIS WEEK IN MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY

Meanwhile, Harrelson’s “brother from [a]nother mother” Matthew McConaughey is still on a journey of intense self-reflection, one that’s apparently culminated in a cross-country road trip. McConaughey posted a photo of himself standing outside his Airstream trailer—complete with a custom grill converted from a keg—and captioned it “travelin the concrete rivers of America.” By the looks of the rock formations in the background, these particular rivers crisscross somewhere in the West Texas/Utah/Arizona/New Mexico vicinity. That’s where McConaughey was scheduled to speak at the Qualtrics X4 summit, until the coronavirus got in the way. But he seems to be making the most of it, practicing a form of “social distancing” that ends with a sunset bourbon, poured from a bottle of his own signature Longbranch.

Still, McConaughey’s most important journey has been inward. Just before he spoke at A+E’s recent HistoryTALKS seminar, he gave an interview to People, where he reflected on how turning fifty last November spurred him to begin thinking about his legacy and “what will they say at your eulogy?” Although it seems ludicrous to assume Matthew McConaughey will ever die, he says this is partly what motivated him to return to Texas, saying of the state, “It’s home. It has more common sense than some places I’ve been. It’s got great hospitality. When a crisis comes, everyone quickly pulls up their bootstraps and says, ‘Well, let’s get to work.’ But Texans teach our kids, ‘Get a passport to get out of here. Go travel the world. Then come back.'” Granted, certain world events have made that a little more difficult than usual. But at least we can still take a vicarious trip through the mind of Matthew McConaughey.