Capitalizing on the ever-present romantic allure of wasting neurodegenerative diseases, The CW has announced that it’s developing a TV series based on Nicholas Sparks’ bestselling Alzheimer’s romance The Notebook and its subsequent film adaptation. The new show is being billed as a period romance, tracking the lives of protagonists Noah and Allie as they attempt to keep their pure, beautiful love alive against a backdrop of class differences, world wars, and the looming threat of the world’s cutest bout of life-destroying amnesia.
Sparks will executive produce the series along with Theresa Park, with Joyful Noise director Todd Graff writing the pilot. There’s no word on casting yet for either the young or old incarnations of the characters—assuming the producers follow the time-jumping structure of the book and movie, and don’t just accede to current TV trends and turn The Notebook into an anthology series about young love being torn apart by increasingly implausible circumstances, from ravenous lions up to the heat death of the universe. In any case, this new version will hopefully be able to repair some of the damage that the 2004 version did to a young, tender-hearted public’s ability to love and to trust, by casting actors who don’t actively loathe each other in the roles of the two protagonists.