LIGHTS OUT's Teresa Palmer and STOKER's Matthew Goode star in A Discovery of Witches, a television series adaptation of a trilogy of novels written by Deborah Harkness. The show will begin airing on Sky One in the U.K. later this year, and a trailer has been released to give us a preview, promising a collision of witches, vampires, and demons (or daemons).
Palmer's character is
Diana, a young scholar at Oxford who is a descendant of the Salem witches. When she accidentally unlocks an enchanted manuscript, she is compelled to embrace the magic in her blood and enters a forbidden romance with charming 1,500-year-old vampire Matthew.
Also in the cast are Alex Kingston as Diana's aunt Sarah Bishop, Valarie Pettiford as Sarah's partner Emily Mather, Lindsey Duncan as Matthew's mother Ysabeau, Owen Teale as power-hungry witch Peter Knox, Edward Bluemel as vampire Marcus, and Daniel Ezra as daemon Nathaniel Wilson.
A Discovery of Witches was the title of the first novel in Harkness's "All Souls" trilogy. It was followed by Shadow of Night and Book of Life. The adaptation has been written by Kate Brooke, who also served as showrunner.
Harkness serves as executive producer on the series, alongside Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner of the production company Bad Wolf. The first three episodes of the show were directed by THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM's Juan Carlos Medina.
I'm not familiar with the source material of this show at all, but the combination of Teresa Palmer, witches, vampires, and demons has my attention. Even if the vampires and demons don't carry on like the bloodthirsty evil monsters I prefer to see them as. I suppose it'd be tough to carry on a romance in the midst of something that's like FROM DUSK TILL DAWN meets THE EVIL DEAD.
A Discovery of Witches has not yet secured distribution in the U.S.