Today in thematically appropriate news: ABC now has two competing Jekyll And Hyde shows

So determined is ABC to adapt Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case Of Jekyll And Hyde, again, that it now has two contemporary updates in the works: Barely a month after purchasing Hyde from Up In The Air co-writer Sheldon Turner, the network has also picked up Jekyll And Hyde from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice writer Matt Lopez, thereby beating all the other networks to the punch by developing its own inevitable copycat competitor. Whereas Hyde filters the familiar tale through what sounds like a slightly more comic premise, involving a doctor whose brash alter ego emerges whenever he goes to sleep, Jekyll And Hyde is described as a “darkly romantic” version with a “sci-fi twist” that may or may not involve cloning, and concerns a female criminal psychologist who gets involved with a “brilliant but inhibited scientist and his volatile alter ego” in modern-day San Francisco. Presumably only one of these will actually make it to air, as ABC is pitting two radically different sides of the same entity against each other to see which one will win out, a scenario that would certainly make for a great story and then hundreds of disappointing copies.