If you’ve been following Trevor Decker News for any length of time, you already know Mckenna Grace is one of the most consistently compelling young actors working today. So when casting news dropped today tying her to one of the most high-profile genre projects currently in development, it wasn’t exactly a surprise — but it was still worth stopping everything to talk about.
Grace is set to play Daphne Blake in Netflix’s live-action Scooby-Doo series, a role that puts her front and center in what could be one of the streamer’s bigger swings of the coming year.
The show itself is worth understanding on its own terms. This isn’t a straightforward adaptation of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The creative team — writer-showrunners Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, who previously worked on Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop — are telling an origin story. The premise drops Daphne and Shaggy into a final summer at camp, where a mystery involving a lost Great Dane puppy with a possible connection to a supernatural killing forces them into the orbit of Velma, Freddy, and eventually the dog we’ll come to know as Scooby-Doo. There’s a darker undercurrent here: the case threatens to expose secrets each of the characters has been carrying, which suggests the writers are going for something with more dramatic weight than the source material might imply.
Berlanti Productions, the powerhouse behind some of television’s most durable genre franchises, is producing alongside Midnight Radio, with Warner Bros. Television as the studio. Netflix picked this up in a competitive situation last spring with a script-to-series commitment — skipping the pilot stage entirely, which signals a meaningful level of institutional confidence in the material.
For Grace, this adds yet another significant title to a slate that is already difficult to keep up with. Scream 7 is coming. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives in November. And now this. It’s a lot — and it all feels earned.
A premiere date has not yet been set, and the rest of the Mystery Inc. casting remains to be announced. But with Grace locked in as Daphne, this one is very much on the radar.