Pedro Almodovar, the ace Spanish director of Volver and this year's Cannes effort Broken Embraces, is set to turn one of his early hits into a TV show. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a farcical story about love, infidelity, terrorism, sleeping pills and gazpacho, was a massive hit for the director in 1988, and is now going to be an English-language show.
The original film starred Carmen Maura, Rossy de Palma and a young Antonio Banderas, in a story about Maura's Pepa, an actress who dubs commercials and whose life goes into a tailspin when her lover leaves her. While she goes a bit nuts (puts her apartment up for sale, makes a large jug of sleeping-pill laced gazpacho) and searches Madrid for him, a series of misunderstandings between her friends and acquaintances make everything very complicated, very silly and totally bizarre.
The TV show will be based around a group of suburban women who have known each other their whole lives, and who are "looking at the second half of their lives" says writer and co-producer Mimi Schmir. It will keep the humour of the original, we're told, and also the gazpacho gag.
Schmir previously worked on Grey's Anatomy and Shark, and we're chosing to believe that the tone of this series will be closer to the latter than the Desperate Housewives clone that it might initially seem. Whatever the case, the film's great and y'all should check that out now, just in case this gets picked up and becomes a massive hit. In the meantime, Broken Embraces will be out here on August 28.