Wow: Some Brave Soul Wants to Adapt the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy for TV

By Kelly Faircloth | September 10, 2014 | 11:45pm

Some ambitious production company has decided in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey to adapt Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty Trilogy into a television show. HOO BOY. Good luck with that, y’all.

The Hollywood Reporter says that Televisa USA (previously responsible for, uh, Lifetime’s Devious Maids) has bought the rights and plans to develop the project. Rachel Winter, who snagged an Oscar nom for The Dallas Buyers Club, has agreed to executive produce, and Rice has given the thumbs-up. “Now is the perfect moment for this project,” said CCO Michael Garcia. “On the heels of such boundary-pushing adaptations as Fifty Shades and HBO’s Game of Thrones, the topics explored in this series are in the zeitgeist and we feel television is finally ready for them.”

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Is it, though? Fifty Shades of Grey and the Sleeping Beauty trilogy aren’t even on the same planet, raunch-wise. There are no Inner Goddesses sighing in the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. Just orifices pouting. It is a legit hardcore BDSM classic and in no way compares to Christian Grey and his sullen spanking fetish.

I mean, the book opens with the Prince awakening Sleeping Beauty ~sexually~ then claiming her as his slave, dragging her off to his mother’s decadent pleasure palace to be properly trained. Hundreds of pages of outright debauchery follow; Beauty spends lots of time crying (but, like, erotically). Which sounds like a fairly standard D/s fantasy, but what are they gonna do, provide an explainer for middle America? It’s been years since I tried the trilogy but, if I remember correctly, there was literally a scene where someone is chained up in the kitchen and has random things stuck in his butthole? Maybe carrots? I’m pretty sure I remember carrots. No judgements whatsoever if that is your thing, and sure, you can probably find filthier things for free on Amazon, but I think we can all agree it’s still pretty tough to show this stuff on television without giving some cable executive a fit of apoplexy. Game of Thrones ain’t done near enough to make THAT mainstream.

But then if you tone the explicit stuff down, there’s a good chance you end up with the 1994 adaptation of Exit to Eden, with Rosie O’Donnell standing around in fetish wear like she cannot believe she agreed to this shit. (Watch the trailer, which is hilarious.)

Then again, while visiting the beach over Labor Day weekend, a middle-aged woman recommended a book to me by saying “it’s like Fifty Shades.” This was in the Florida Panhandle, a place where you’ll be driving down the street and see more than one church with a baptismal font out front. Maybe America will surprise me!