First Peggy Carter might be getting her own show. Now it’s Esmeralda’s turn. I half expect there to be an announcement about the return of Xena by the end of the day.
Disney has announced that they’re taking to ABC to tell the story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame—their version, not Victor Hugo‘s book version, which is decidedly more depressing than its Disney counterpart—from the perspective of its heroine, Esmeralda.
Esmeralda will be a limited series, meaning it’ll have one short season and a definite end point, kind of like a miniseries. Think CBS’ Under the Dome. The series will be written by Evan Daugherty, who penned Snow White and the Huntsman.
I’ve heard Snow White and the Huntsman is bad, but I haven’t seen it, so I can’t really say whether Daugherty writing this fills me with horror. Esmeralda will be the third Disney show ABC has going; the other two are Once Upon a Time and its spinoff Once Upon a Time In Wonderland, which was originally conceived as a limited series itself. I wouldn’t be surprised by some sort of Once/Esmeralda crossover—no one from Hunchback has appeared in the Once-verse yet, so maybe post-movie Esmeralda will show up and tease her story, which will then be expanded upon in her own series? Disney’s made no mention of anything like that, and none of the same producers are involved in Esmeralda and Once, but given Disney/Marvel/ABC’s tendency to tie its properties together in a neat package it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.
What do you think? I’m cautiously optimistic—like I said, I have no particular aversion to Daugherty, and Once is one of those shows that I really enjoy watching even though I think it’s not that great quality-wise (gotta have something to knit during). And I haven’t seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame since it came out in theaters seventeen years ago (it’s been seventeen years, oh my God), so my memory of the Disneyfied Esmeralda is fuzzy at best. Please, ABC, just don’t make it racist.
(via: Deadline)
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