Of all the books in the world, Little Women is being adapted into a 'gritty' television show

A still from the 1940's movie "Little Women."
(Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

This isn't your great-great-great-great-grandmother's Little Women.

Because now we have to go back to the 1800s for our television shows, the CW is putting into development a series that takes the beloved March sisters and throws them into a situation much worse than living with scarlet fever and rejecting marriage proposals. As Deadline reports, the project is being described as a "hyper-stylized, gritty adaptation of the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott, in which disparate half-sisters Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy band together in order to survive the dystopic streets of Philadelphia and unravel a conspiracy that stretches far beyond anything they have ever imagined — all while trying not to kill each other in the process." OK.

Why stop there? Let's make Tom Sawyer an android anarchist attempting to survive life in a hellish police state, and maybe Moby Dick can live in a post-apocalyptic ocean where he's just misunderstood and not really out to destroy ships and kill people. Now that Atticus Finch is a racist, it's not like the classics are sacred anymore, anyway.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.