Paramount+ announced Monday that its newcomer series Fatal Attraction will premiere April 30 with two episodes that will air back-to-back.
Series executive producer Alexandra Cunningham teased Monday during the show’s panel at TCA how the drama will resemble the hit 1987 film starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close.
(L-R_ Joshua Jackson, Amanda Peet and Lizzy Caplan
“The film’s screenwriter, James Dearden, said he didn’t see the character of Alex Forrest as a study in insanity, but rather as a sad, tragic, lonely woman under the pressure of a really tough job. As an often sad, not at all tragic, and not as lonely a person as I would like, but under the pressure of a really tough job, I wanted us to go in a slightly different direction,” Cunningham said.
She continued, “This reimagining of Fatal Attraction has a lot in common with the iconic original film, but it’s also about entitlements and the midlife crisis and how some of the sausage is made in our broken justice system, as well as Cluster B personality disorders and isolation, of fathers and daughters and murder. It’s about the fact that some people just can’t win. It’s about self-image and what we do to protect it, and also what happens when someone doesn’t have one. And when we’ve done our job, which these actors and their colleagues definitely did, they think your sympathies will change more than once.”
Written by Cunningham from a story she co-wrote with Kevin J. Hynes, Fatal Attraction explores the themes of marriage and infidelity through the lens of modern attitudes toward strong women, personality disorders, and compulsive control.
The series stars Joshua Jackson as Dan Gallagher, Lizzy Caplan as Alex, Amanda Peet as Beth Gallagher, Alyssa Jirrels as Ellen Gallagher, Toby Huss as Mike Gerard, Reno Wilson as Detective Earl Booker and Brian Goodman as Arthur Tomlinson.