Freddie Highmore and David Shore Land Crave Series Commission
freddie highmore is back in business with David Shore. Crave and Sony Pictures Television have jointly commissioned I'm Not Here to Hurt You, the drama the pair co-created after their seven-season run on The Good Doctor.
The series is being built as more than a Canadian original. Sony Pictures Television will shop it to buyers in the U.S. and the rest of the world, which gives the project a distribution path well beyond Crave’s subscription audience.
Highmore and Shore Reunite
Freddie Highmore and Shore released a joint statement saying, “We weren’t quite done with each other after all. We’re thrilled to be collaborating again, excited to return to Canada alongside our partners at Bell and Blink49 Studios and grateful for Sony’s continued support. And now we have to get to work.” That is the clearest signal that this is not a one-off development deal; it is a working series with a production team already lining up.
Lauren Stein, Sony Pictures TV’s executive vice president and head of creative, called the pair’s partnership “an extraordinary creative partnership built on trust, collaboration, and a shared passion for powerful storytelling.” She added that they have “a unique ability to create richly layered characters who are imperfect, complicated and deeply relatable, the kind of characters audiences genuinely care about.”
Blink49 and Bell Media
John Morayniss’ Blink49 Studios will produce I'm Not Here to Hurt You with Sony, tying the project to a Canadian production base and an international sales strategy at the same time. Crave, the subscription entertainment streaming platform owned by Bell Media, is the commissioning home, which keeps the series inside Bell’s orbit while Sony handles the wider market push.
The setup is unusual for a scripted drama because the commission and the sales plan are moving together. Bell Media already used that route with Heated Rivalry, a Crave original that HBO picked up as an acquisition, so the new series arrives with a recent example of how a Crave title can travel beyond its original home.
The Podcast and the Plot
The project is based on a 2023 podcast of the same name produced by the Irish Independent and hosted by Kevin Doyle. Its story follows a man who, after killing someone in a bicycle accident, spirals into a life of crime while trying never to hurt anyone ever again.
That premise gives Highmore a very different lane from The Good Doctor, the seven-season ABC run he shared with Shore and Sony from 2017 to 2024. He was recently featured in The Assassin on Amazon Prime Video, but this commission puts him back inside the Shore machine, where character-first writing and long-run television economics have already worked for all three once before.
For Crave, the important move is not just owning a new drama title; it is pairing the commission with Sony’s U.S. and international sales push from the start. For viewers, that usually means a series designed to travel, not stay local, and this one already has the team and the sales plan to do exactly that.
