A month after it was announced that Megan Hilty and Alyson Hannigan were cast in TVLand’s television remake of The First Wives Club, another cast member has been added to the show. Variety reports that Vanessa Lachey has joined the show as the third lead of the remake.
The basic setup of the show is that three friends in San Francisco reconnect after the death of one of their friends from college dies in a freak accident.
Lachey will play Sasha, a successful chef in San Francisco, with a great professional and personal life as she plans on marrying her girlfriend. However, after she reconnects with her friends Kim (Hilty) and Maggie (Hannigan), she realizes that she’s not ready to settle down and get married, even though that’s what she previously thought.
Hannigan’s character, Maggie, is a professor at a university in San Francisco who realizes that she doesn’t want to be in her marriage anymore and begins making changes to add some adventure in her life that had been lacking before the death of her friend.
Hilty’s character, Kim, is a Hollywood has-been who will do anything to stay fit and revive her Hollywood career. She’s divorced and has an eight-year-old son and is looking forward to reconnecting with her old friends.
The premise of the show loosely follows the plot of the original movie, which was a box office hit when it was released in 1996 and starred Stockard Channing, Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton as the four friends.
Throughout her career, Lachey has had a number of guest starring and hosting spots on TV. She was a host of MTV’s TRL, a NYC correspondent on Entertainment Tonight and was a host on ABC’s Wipeout from 2011 through 2012. She’s also appeared on How I Met Your Mother, CSI: NY and Hawaii Five-0. She had a main role on Fox’s Dads and NBC’s Truth Be Told, both of which only lasted one season.
She also appeared in Disaster Movie with Kim Kardashian and appeared in the music video for Nick Lachey’s song What’s Left of Me, which is where the two of them met before they dated and eventually got married in 2011.
The pilot is written by Rebecca Addelman and the executive producers are Jenny Bicks and Karen Rosenfelt. The show is being produced by Paramount TV.
No premiere date has been set for the show as it’s just in its pilot stage and has yet to actually be picked up by the network.