"What I wanted was to be evocative of the fun and sexiness and danger of the movie but also do something different and contemporary," Friedman said. "More than magic, mine is a fantasy about female friendship."
For the series, she abandoned the campy '80s trappings and supernatural vagueness -- in the film, the women's powers randomly come and go -- in favor of something more grounded. Each of the three new witches in sleepy seaside Eastwick, here played by Rebecca Romijn, Lindsay Price and Jamie Ray Newman, is granted a gift specific to her midlife hang-up. (Price's character, for example, is a meek, bespectacled wallflower who suddenly finds herself with the power to bend men's wills -- after she ditches the glasses and updo, of course.)
"The magic and mythology is really just gravy for us," said Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs, ABC's executive vice president of scripted programming. Even the devilish man, played by Paul Gross, who helps awaken the trio's potential, may or may not be Satan this time around.
Patmore-Gibbs said: "We just wanted to hang out with these women. 'The Witches of Eastwick' means something to a certain age group, certainly, but you don't have to have seen the movie or read the book to get into it."
A recent favorite
Of the three shows, ABC Family's "10 Things I Hate About You" might have the most baggage to shed. The original film, itself an update of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," featured Julia Stiles and the late Heath Ledger, the latter in a star-making performance as the longhaired misfit who falls for Stiles' tough-talking high school feminist.
Their characters had to be reinvented for the show, which will follow the mismatched Stratford sisters and the students at Padua High. "It was really concerning," said ABC Family head of programming Kate Juergens. "Heath's role was particularly hard to cast, and we didn't want to replicate what he'd done and do ourselves a disservice by comparison. So we went in a different direction entirely."
Ethan Peck, the grandson of Gregory, will play the character of Patrick Verona. Juergens said that whereas Ledger had a "beautiful, sunny, playful presence," Peck has a "dark, brooding, deeply classical romantic thing going on."
She added that she had had her eye on the film ever since seeing a research presentation that listed "10 Things" among the Top 10 influential films among "young millenials," ABC Family's target audience. Once she found out parent company Disney owned the rights, she immediately began to develop the project.
Gil Junger, who directed the film and will direct several episodes of the series, said the show stands on its own because the characters from the movie do.
"I think if Disney had signed the cast of '10 Things' to a two- or three-picture deal -- and I'm still surprised they didn't -- there would have been a '10 Things 2' and '10 Things 3' and they would have been equally successful," Junger said, "because people fell in love not with the story but with those characters."
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denise.martin@latimes.com
