Having temporarily exhausted its supply of comedies with dicks and bitches in the title, ABC has moved on to shoring up its new slate of dramas for next season, giving orders to six in all. Along with the previously reported The River (a horror drama from Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli) and Good Christian Bitches (which started ABC’s whole “bitch” obsession), Deadline reports that the network has given orders to the following:
– Marc Cherry’s Hallelujah, a dramedy from the Desperate Housewives creator about a town torn apart by the forces of good and evil, and whose savior may be a newly arrived mysterious stranger. Each episode will “be punctuated by songs sung by the gospel choir, which serves as a sort of Greek chorus,” which is a gimmick that will surely stick around for a good long time without exhausting itself. (“Sarcaaaasm, lordy looooord.”)
– Once Upon A Time, the third show of pilot season to take place in a town where magic and fairy tales are real, joining NBC’s recently announced 17th District and Grimm. Initially Lost’s Damon Lindelof was involved in this show’s development but is busy playing space aliens with Ridley Scott, so it falls entirely to fellow Lost alums Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz to survive what is shaping up to be the Magic Show Showdown of 2011. Kitsis and Horowitz also wrote Tron Legacy and that upcoming Ouija Board movie, which are simply two facts being presented to provide context.
– Identity, a U.S. adaptation (to be written by Eagle Eye’s John Glenn) of an ITV show about an elite police unit battling identity theft, elitely, with tactics that are best described as “elite.” Did someone steal your social security number and use it to clean out your bank account? Don’t phone the regular police, because they are not nearly elite enough.
– Revenge, a retelling of The Count Of Monte Cristo from a female perspective, concerning a mysterious young woman who arrives in the Hamptons to exact—wait for it—revenge on the people who destroyed her family. Naturally, it’s in a contemporary setting, so the Bonapartism will probably be replaced with something like insider trading. And, you know, it’ll be sexy: The show comes from Swingtown director Mike Kelley and Twilight producers Temple Hill, who also have a Romeo And Juliet series in the works. Should next season’s sudden influx of supernatural dramas somehow fail to take off, sexed-up literary adaptations are just waiting in the wings.