After announcing plans for a Shakespeare-inspired show back in April, Lifetime is officially moving forward with the show. According to Variety, Lifetime has officially greenlit A Midsummer’s Nightmare for its first season.
The show was first announced as part of Lifetime’s rebranding efforts to focus on shows that had more of female empowerment feeling to them, rather than the damsel in distress programming that the network had been known for the past few years.
“We’re really taking big swings at Lifetime and developing content that redefines what it means to be a Lifetime show. A Midsummer’s Nightmare is unlike anything Lifetime has ever done before,” Liz Gateley, executive vice president and head of programming for Lifetime, said.
A Midsummer’s Nightmare hails from A+E Studios, the same studio that produces UnREAL, another popular drama on the network.
The new show will be a retelling of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, but with a modern twist on it. The series is set up to be an psychological thriller anthology series.
The first season of the show will focus on Elena, a young woman who goes on a summer getaway that quickly descends into madness. Four people who are all in love go off to fulfill their heart’s desires, but the woods that they escape to don’t want to play by the group’s plans of love, instead having their romantic desires play against the couples.
Back in April, when the show was first put into development, Variety said that each of the susbsequent seasons of the show would revolve around different Shakespeare comedies and tragedies.
The original Shakespeare play was one of his comedies. It had four plotlines that all focused on the events leading up to the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta. The play has been adapted many times, including multiple ballets based off the play, movies, including the 1999 film version, a reference in The Dead Poets Society and different TV shows, where the plots have been updated to reflect the times.
Casting has not yet been announced for the show, but Anthony Jaswinski wrote the pilot episode and he will be the executive producer of the show, with Jeff Kwatinetz and Josh Barry also serving as executive producers. There’s no word as to when production will start or when the show will air on the network.