The producing minds behind Gossip Girl, Josh Schwartz, and Stephanie Savage, are bringing another YA book series to the small screen as it has been announced that The CW is developing a TV adaptation of Sweet Valley High, based on the books by Francine Pascal.
The bestselling novels were previously adapted into the 1994 series Sweet Valley High, which aired in syndication before moving to of The CW’s predecessors, UPN, for its fourth and final season. Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage seem like the perfect choices to help bring this concept to life as the youth market has been their bread and butter with such successful teen shows like The O.C., Gossip Girl, and its current HBO Max reboot which has already been renewed for a second season. Gossip Girl was also based on a series of popular YA novels.
Ashley Wigfield, who is a writer/producer on HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot, will write the adaptation which takes place in Sweet Valley, a town everyone dreams of growing up in. This is very true for Elizabeth Wakefield but when her missing twin sister Jessica miraculously returns, it reignites a lifelong rivalry between the two sisters. It falls to new girl Enid Ruiz to discover that someone (or something) is pulling all the strings, but can she convince the twins that putting their personal war aside is the only way to drag Sweet Valley’s dark roots into the California sunshine?
The “Sweet Valley High” book series launch in 1983, with 181 books published in the next 20 years. The previous TV adaptation starred real-life twins Brittany Daniel and Cynthia Daniel and actually became a bit of a cult hit among its target audience. There had been some interest in doing a movie version of the books and Diablo Cody was once tapped to write a script. In 2017, Paramount Pictures hired Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith and Harper Dill to co-write a feature adaptation but nothing came of it.
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