Twisted fairytale series Tell Me a Story adds grandma and a wolf

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

SCREAM screenwriter Kevin Williamson is reimagining popular fairytales for the CBS All Access psychological thriller series Tell Me a Story, and it sounds like the show has just cast the main roles needed for a Little Red Riding Hood-inspired plot.

Set in modern day New York City, the first season of this serialized drama interweaves “The Three Little Pigs,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Hansel and Gretel” into an epic and subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge and murder.

Danielle Campbell (pictured above), who genre fans may know from her role as witch Davina Claire on The Originals, has signed on to star in Tell Me a Story as Kayla, a character who has the following description: "Beautiful and full of anger, Kayla has just moved from Oakland to New York with her dad. She lost her mother a year ago and since then has strayed from her once promising path — hanging with the wrong crowd, partying… anything to distract from the pain and grief of her mother’s death."

Kim Cattrall will be playing Kayla's grandma Colleen, who is described as being an "unlikely and very non-traditional" grandmother. "When her son moves back home, bringing with him a troubled teenager, Kayla, this former chorus girl is going to have to grow up finally and take on the parental duties to protect her family against a very dark and sinister threat."

That dark and sinister threat seems to come in the form of actor Billy Magnussen as Nick, "a young high school teacher who’s handsome, seductive, and quite possibly a wolf in sheep’s clothing. After a wild night with a girl he met at a nightclub results in a hookup but no phone numbers swapped, he thinks his chances with her have gone out the window. But when he runs into her again, he’s sure to take advantage of his second chance, proving he’s sensitive, understanding… and, quite possibly, too good to be true."

Liz Friedlander is directing the first two episodes of Tell Me a Story and will be executive producing alongside Williamson and Aaron Kaplan and Dana Honor of Kapital Entertainment.

I think there's a lot of promise in taking the stories set up in fairytales and using them as the basis of a dark, twisted modern day thriller. It all depends on how the updated stories are executed. I'm interested in the basic idea, so I'll be giving Tell Me a Story a chance.