Acorn TV Announces Another New Mystery Series, 'Irish Blood'

The first modern classic film my mother and I ever agreed on was Clueless, the 1995 Alicia Silverstone film in which she plays Cher, a modern-day version of Jane Austen's classic heroine, Emma. The American-born actor recently made a career comeback after dropping off the radar for a while as Kristy's mom in Netflix's far-too-short-lived The Baby-Sitters Club. Now, she's returning to the audience that still loves Clueless three decades on, not in another Jane Austen film, but in an Acorn TV mystery series, which is, apparently, a factory for the gainful employment of women whose original heyday was in the 1990s. The new series, called Irish Blood, features Silverstone not as an Irish crime solver but as an American who returns to her roots to discover what happened to her father.

This is the second series starring someone that women in the 30s and 40s remember fondly in as many weeks; Acorn TV only just announced True Blood heartthrob Stephen Moyer will also be headlining a new mystery series, Art Detectives. Both shows follow in the footsteps of Acorn TV's other successes like the Jane Seymour-starring Harry Wild and the Lucy Lawless series My Life Is Murder. However, like Art Detectives is trying the formula with a man in the central role, Irish Blood will be the first where an American actor stars in the lead role, playing an American transplant who found their way across the pond.

The new series stars Silverstone as a hot-shot Los Angeles divorce lawyer named Fiona Sharpe. The show will kick off when she receives a letter from her estranged father and sets out to Ireland to uncover the mystery of his disappearance. Currently, the show is being styled not as a mystery of the week but as a single season-long case, giving the network a limited series option if viewers aren't as enthused by an American lead.