"Paranormal" Romeo And Juliet and Jennifer Love Hewitt's Pride And Prejudice added to TV's sort-of-reading list

By Sean O'Neal | December 12, 2012 | 8:45pm

Aux Features TV

Driven by its lifelong love affair with the written word that it did not have to write itself, television's recent campaign to adapt literary classics for a modern audience and for zero dollars has added updated versions of Pride And Prejudice and Romeo And Juliet to its public domain reading list of books it's not actually interested in reading. In the quickly established tradition of upcoming shows based on Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Sense And Sensibility, Tom Sawyer And Huckleberry Finn, Dracula, Hamlet, and Alice In Wonderland, Lifetime and ABC Family will put new spins on the well-worn Jane Austen and William Shakespeare tales, respectively, answering the contemporary dearth of scripts in which two people fall in love with each other but someone else doesn't want them to.

ABC Family's Juliet Immortal will go the "paranormal love story" route with Romeo And Juliet—a sentence that, sadly, seems perfectly routine here in 2012—adapting Stacey Jay's novel in which Juliet is murdered by Romeo in order for him to gain immortality, but Juliet returns from the dead, similarly unkillable and sworn to fight Romeo " to preserve romantic love and the lives of the innocent." Again, this is Romeo And Juliet, because look at their names. Meanwhile, Lifetime has signed noted romance author and The Client List star Jennifer Love Hewitt to supplement her usual handjob activities there with the even more masturbatory exercise of producing her very own version of Pride And Prejudice, this one set among the landed gentry and ingrained class struggles of modern-day, small-town Virginia. Naturally, it's named Darcy's Town, presumably because Can't Buy Me Love was, unfortunately, already taken. Finally, these two stories will be told, but in a more modern way and better.