TVD’s Julie Plec Takes Rights To E. Lockhart’s YA Novels ‘We Were Liars,’ ‘Family of Liars’ & ‘Again Again’
‘The Vampire Diaries’ Julie Plec and Universal TV have optioned the rights to E. Lockhart’s wildly popular YA novels ‘We Were Liars,’ ‘Family of Liars’ and ‘Again Again’ it has been announced.
Released in 2014, ‘We Were Liars’ is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel that follows Cadence Sinclair Eastman, a teen from a wealthy, beautiful, and distinguished family. However, whilst they present as prim, proper and respectable, they are liars… Set on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts, the story revolves around a mysterious tragedy which befell Cadence two years ago, leaving her with amnesia about the events. Now, she has returned to the island, determined to discover what happened to her last time she was there.
‘Family of Liars’ was a prequel novel which takes the reader back to the story of another summer on the island, with another generation, and the secrets that will haunt them for decades to come.
Plec, who is set to adapt both novels herself, commented “I’ve chased We Were Liars for years. It’s one of the best YA novels I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot. It’s mysterious, romantic and devastating – and Family of Liars showed me just how sprawling and multi-generational the series can be. Being able to adapt it for television is a career highlight for me.”
‘Again Again’ is a separate novel which follows Adelaide Buchwald who, after a near-fatal family catastrophe and an unexpected romantic upheaval, finds herself catapulted into a summer of wild possibility, during which she will fall in and out of love a thousand times – while finally confronting the secrets she keeps, her ideas about love, and the weird grandiosity of the human mind.
Carina Adly MacKenzie (‘Roswell New Mexico’, ‘The Originals’) is set to adapt ‘Again Again’ alongside original author E. Lockhart. MacKenzie will serve as showrunner/EP should it go to series, with Plec also exec producing.
“One day in early 2020, Julie Plec and I drank white wine and ate taco chips together in a Mexican restaurant,” adds Lockhart. “Though I had met her before, and though I adored The Originals and Legacies and Roswell, New Mexico, when we had drinks she was so wonderfully, amazingly astute about storytelling, she understood the themes in my books so well, and she was such an incredible powerhouse of business acumen and nutball levels of intelligence, I knew I would be insanely lucky to have her take charge of as many of my novels as she wanted. As for Carina Adly MacKenzie, she is a story queen and a brainiac who is very funny and mind-blowingly thoughtful. I can’t wait to go on this adventure with her.”
Having spent years at The CW & WBTV, in January 2020 Plec signed a new deal for her production company, My So-Called Company, with Universal Television. The first series to drop from that deal is an adaptation of Richelle Mead’s‘Vampire Academy‘ which is set to air on Peacock in the US and UK in September 2022.
My So-Called Company is also working on ‘Clifton’ based on the novel Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix, adapted by Aisha Porter-Christie (‘Orphan Black’, ‘Shadowhunters’); Medical drama ‘Douglass Medical’ created by Ayanna Floyd (‘The Chi’, ‘Private Practice’); Mystery drama ‘Freeman’ from Adam Starks (‘Good Trouble’, ‘On My Block’); Romantic dramedy ‘Stay Gold’ based on the novel by Tobly McSmith, following a transgender teen in their senior year of high school, adapted by McSmith and Drew Greenberg (‘Arrow’, ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’); And romantic horror fantasy ‘This Savage Song’ based on the novel by Victoria Schwab, with Plec and Schwab writing the adaptation.
With the exception of ‘Vampire Academy‘, none of these shows have series orders yet and are considered to be “in development”. We’ll let you know if/when we hear more.
