Greensburg native Stephanie Meyer Sourapas wrote Hallmark Mystery’s “Crimes of Fashion: Killer Clutch” (9 p.m. Friday) with writing partner Tom McCurrie and, unlike many Hallmark movies that are set in small-town America, “Crimes of Fashion” moves the action to Paris, though large chunks of the film shot in Budapest doubling for Paris.

American fashion psychologist Lauren (Brooke D’Orsay) works to clear her friend of a murder that happens backstage at a Paris fashion show. Lauren ends up working (and sparring flirtatiously) with a French police officer, Andre (Gilles Marini).

A 1985 graduate of Latrobe Greater High School, Sourapas started her career in advertising at BBDO in Chicago working on the Wrigley gum account, but she always dreamed of becoming a writer. In 1994, she decided to quit and move to Los Angeles to pursue that goal.

Her first Hollywood job was as a receptionist for Game Show Network. She planned to work a day job and write screenplays at night, but the 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Hollywood grind made that difficult. She stepped back from the industry to raise a family, but once her children were in elementary school, Sourapas began writing regularly.

“I have written children’s books and it took three years to write a novel,” Sourapas said of early unpublished efforts. “Then I thought, wait a minute, I’m in Los Angeles, why am I not writing screenplays?”

She started working with McCurrie in 2013, and their first filmed script, “Making Spirits Bright” starring Taylor Cole and Carlo Marks, aired as a Hallmark Channel “Countdown to Christmas” movie in 2021.

The writers pitched “Crimes of Fashion” as “ ‘Emily in Paris’ as a mystery,” which Hallmark bought in January 2022. They turned in their final script on May 1, 2023, the day before the writers’ strike began.

“It was a pretty flawless development cycle,” Sourapas, 55, said. “They really trusted us with the story. There wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth changes.”

After the writers’ strike ended last fall, “Crimes of Fashion” filmed over 15 days in December.

Sourapas said “Crimes of Fashion” was initially inspired by the character of Wendy Rhodes (Maggie Siff), a performance coach on Showtime’s “Billions.” Additionally, Sourapas read about an actual fashion psychologist whose job is to recognize trends and coach fashion designers through their high-stress, anxiety-riddled careers creating new collections four times each year.

“We loved the idea of the fish-out-of-water, ‘An American in Paris,’ and you put her in a fashion house with all these wonderful, colorful characters and it seemed fun to do death by French hair pin,” Sourapas said. “There are a lot of deadly fashion accessories we can use if we get to make more.”

Her goal is for “Crimes of Fashion” to become part of the network’s “mystery wheel,” similar to past movie series like “Aurora Teagarden Mysteries” and “Mystery 101.”

Sourapas and McCurrie did not get to visit the set of “Crimes of Fashion,” she said, “because it’s only our second picture and you have to fight a little bit to get to the set. We’ll get there but it’s not always a given. The actors said they would have loved to have us there for questions about motivation and emotional cues.”

While waiting to hear if “Crimes of Fashion” will return for future installments, Sourapas and her writing partner are on a tight deadline writing a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie that will air late this year.

‘9-1-1’

At 8 tonight, (WTAE-TV) “9-1-1” relocates from Fox to ABC for its seventh season premiere that finds Athena (Angela Bassett) and Bobby (Peter Krause) on a honeymoon cruise when duty calls (AKA their cruise ship gets hijacked and eventually pulls a Titanic).

During a visit to the show’s set on the Fox Studios’ Century City lot last month as part of the Television Critics Association winter 2024 press tour, “9-1-1” star Peter Krause said the show’s co-creator and showrunner, Tim Minear, aspires to be TV’s Irwin Allen, producer of 1970s disaster films “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.”

“We’ve done an earthquake, a tidal wave; now we’re doing ‘The Poseidon Adventure,’ ” Krause said of the cruise ship storyline that will stretch over the first three episodes of the new season. (Turns out Athena is afraid of cruises after watching “Poseidon Adventure” on ABC as a child.)

“We just wanted to show up at ABC and put our worst foot forward and do a big disaster,” Minear said. “The tsunami that took out the Santa Monica Pier was weirdly easier to produce than a capsized cruise ship. We almost had a [real] cruise ship (to film on). And then the cruise ship company was like, ‘We’ll let you use our cruise ship but nothing bad can happen.’ Like, have you seen the show? And they’re like, ‘Well, you can capsize it, blow a hole in it, sink it, as long as at the end we see it’s fine and then they sail off.’ I’m like, no, we’re not going to do that.”

Later this season the long-suffering couple of Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Chimney (Kenneth Choi) will finally tie the knot.

“They’ve been through too much,” Hewitt said.

“They deserve happiness,” Choi added.

“And it’s going to go really smooth,” Minear added with an heir of menace.

“Oh, no,” Hewitt said. “That part I’m scared about.”

“On Twitter, you see like the fans going, ‘Why can’t they be happy?’ ” Minear said. “It’s like, oh, you don’t want to see them on the show anymore is what youre saying.”

Minear, who previously worked on the cult series “Firefly,” “Dollhouse” and “Angel,” finds similarities in “9-1-1” even though it’s a totally different genre.

“It’s ‘Firefly,’ right? It’s this found family. There are large rooms with large vehicles,” Minear said. “The thing about ‘9-1-1’ is that it can be a rom-com, it can be a soap, it can be satire, it can be a heartbreaking melodrama. It can be all of those things in the same episode. … The canvas on this show is absolutely unlimited.”

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