Brittany Bristow is talented, and from her interview with the DTH guys, has loads of personality and is fun.
There are plenty of young actresses that can act. Put them in these movies and they’ll be known to the audience too. There are a lot of viewers who know these actors & actresses from seeing them on Hallmark, and that’s the only reason they know them. Danica and CCB are 47 & 46, so they can’t play 30 year-olds for much longer without it looking like when Joan Crawford was on The Secret Storm taking over her daughter’s role.
IMO, Aurora Teagarden was played out and got boring. They should have stopped making them 3 episodes ago, so I won’t miss that one a bit.
Crown Media /Hallmark has signed Andrew Walker, Lacey, Holly Robinson Peete, Brennan Elliott, Taylor Cole, and Heather Hemmens to contracts.
From what Andrew said in an interview he is guaranteed 2 movies a year, not including any additional Curious Caterer mysteries, and could always include more movies. He & Nikki both, to me, sounded like there would probably be more episodes, but maybe I was reading more into it than I should have.
Hallmark and Crown Media will be fine.
Brennan mentioned in DTH a few months ago that he and Lacey wanted to do more of these, but wasn’t sure they would or not. He also said Lacey had a lot of ideas for future projects. IIRC, that interview was before he and Lacey signed their contracts with Hallmark, so maybe Lacey made some requests and got some promises.
From some of the feedback I’ve seen and read, the move from fewer mysteries to more dramatic movies is not very popular with viewers, so I would not be surprised to see more mysteries.