If Flowers In The Attic sequels are wrong, Lifetime doesn’t want to be right

By Katie Rife | September 4, 2014 | 5:18pm

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With incest quickly becoming the trendiest taboo since that month in 1995 when everybody wore dog collars, it stands to reason that Lifetime would want to continue the most incestuous story ever told. (For the moment, anyway; no one but Florida knows when the next great crime of brother/sister passion is going to go down.) To this end, Lifetime has officially greenlit If There Be Thorns, the third installment in its TV adaptations of V.C. Andrews’ Dollanganger series. (A fourth movie, Seeds Of Yesterday, is reportedly close to being officially approved.) The story will follow now-grown siblings Cathy and Christopher as they move to California to live as brother-man and sister-wife, while trying to hide their family’s sordid past from Cathy’s sons.

Some 6.1 million people tuned in to watch Ellen Burstyn bring out the tar in Flowers In The Attic, making it a blockbuster hit for the cable network. Ratings dropped by almost half for the sequel, Petals On The Wind, but just like the forbidden passion between blood relatives, Lifetime knows that no audience can ever understand it like trashy ’80s paperbacks do. If There Be Thorns has an official air date of “2015,” but at the rate Lifetime’s been churning these things out, don’t be surprised if it bows before Valentine’s Day.