Like a ragamuffin taken under the wing of a wealthy sponsor and given the sexiest actors that money not spent on optioning intellectual property can buy, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations is aboard the steamer to The CW, joining a class of recent, similarly lifted-from-the-public-domain TV inspirations like The Count Of Monte Cristo, Dracula, Tom Sawyer And Huck Finn, Hamlet, Wuthering Heights , and The CW's own Alice In Wonderland and Sleepy Hollow in the high society of low originality. Like most of those projects, the new Great Expectations will get certain modern-day twists necessitated by its being on The CW, including the obligatory streamlining of the title to Expectations, and gender-swapping the lead.
The show now concerns a small-town girl who struggles to make it big in San Francisco, then gets a boost from an anonymous benefactor—presumably leading her to become a tough cop and investigate, as necessitated by the rules of updating classics for television. The show's own, not-so-anonymous benefactor is executive producer Reese Witherspoon, who took time out from pacing the threadbare carpet 'round a rat-infested cake, awaiting her next wedding movie, to develop this show out of her long-professed love of literature, which she's demonstrating by completely changing it into this.