Sweet Valley High Reboot No Longer in Development at The CW

The new reimagining of Sweet Valley High isn’t hitting our television screens anytime soon. According to a new report from TVLine, Sweet Valley, the new adaptation of the beloved YA book series is no longer in development at The CW, nearly six months after the project was first announced. The report does indicate that CBS Television Studios, who is behind the project with Paramount Television Studios, might “try to set it up elsewhere.” Sweet Valley would have been inspired by Francine Pascal’s book series of the same name, and would have been written by Ashley Wigfield, who worked as a writer-producer on HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot. The project would have been executive produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, whose work includes the original Gossip Girl and Nancy Drew.

According to The CW’s original description for the series, Sweet Valley is the town everyone dreams of growing up in. And there’s no better example of that promise than Elizabeth Wakefield. But when her missing twin sister Jessica miraculously returns, it reignites a lifelong rivalry. 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?

This would have been the latest adaptation of the Sweet Valley world, following the syndicated series Sweet Valley High in the 1990s. There had previously been efforts to turn the franchise into a movie, with Diablo Cody, Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, and Harper Dill attached to write the script at one point or another. 

Sweet Valley High has spawned over 180 books since it launched in 1983, and helped make Pascal into somewhat of a household name.

“A friend of mine had lunch with a [book] editor, a man, who said, ‘Why isn’t there a Dallas for young people?’ I thought about it, and I actually had a book [proposal] due,” Pascal explained in a 2019 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “There are a lot of twins in my life. [My agent] Amy [Berkower] is a twin. My sister-in-law was a twin. People are always fascinated by twins. You’ll never be alone. [Laughs] I thought about it, and this other soap opera thing was in my head, the one that I couldn’t sell. I sat down and I wrote a [character] bible and the first 12 [SVH] stories. It went quickly because it was such a fertile idea. Bantam Books loved it. They ordered all 12.”

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