Here's every fairy tale adapted by CBS' Tell Me A Story. Kevin Williamson broke through as a screenwriter with Scream, which not only gave the horror genre a major boost after a fallow period in the early 1990s, but also popularised meta-humor too. Scream functioned as both an intense slasher movie - a testament to director Wes Craven's skill with the genre - and as a loving deconstruction of its tropes. The movie was a massive success and made the writer red hot in the years that followed.
In addition to penning Scream 2, he wrote cult horror The Faculty, had a major hand in shaping Steve Miner's Halloween H20 - itself a precursor to the modern-day popularity of legacy sequels - and created hit teen drama Dawson's Creek. While he and Craven both suffered during the famously messy production of werewolf horror Cursed, Williamson has remained very active in the last 20 years. In addition to penning Scream 4, he was the showrunner on the likes of The Vampire Diaries and The Following.
He was also the creator of Tell Me A Story, a CBS All Access series that offered contemporary takes on famous fairy tales. The series ran for two seasons between 2018 and 2020, and while it received mostly lukewarm reviews, it also attracted a fanbase too. One critique leveled at CBS' Tell Me A Story was that while it may have adapted beloved fairy tales, they often altered the stories and themes beyond recognition.
Each season adapted three fairy tales, with Tell Me A Story season 1 offering new takes on Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs and Hansel And Gretel. The Little Red Riding Hood portion follows a teenager named Kayla (Danielle Campbell), who has moved to New York with her father to live with her grandmother (Kim Cattrall). The wolf of the story comes in the form of her new teacher Nick (Billy Magnussen), with who she has a one-night stand. The Three Little Pigs segment sees a man become a vigilante when his fiancee is gunned down during a robbery by men in pig masks, while the Hansel and Gretel portion of Tell Me A Story involves a sister helping her drug-addicted brother after he accidentally kills a man.
Tell Me A Story season 2 retained some cast members like Paul Wesley, but otherwise focused on new characters and storylines. This season involves the three grown-up children of music manager Rebecca Pruitt (Carrie-Anne Moss), with each sibling getting their own fairy tale reinvention. Ashley (Natalie Alyn Lind) is the focus of the Beauty And The Beast-inspired tale, where her famous singer is badly burned and drawn into a romance with her bodyguard Beau. The Sleeping Beauty story has Wesley's writer with a secret become obsessed with a woman who is not his fiancee Maddie (Odette Annable), while the Cinderella segment is given to Ashley Madekwe's Simone, who Jackson Pruitt - the family black sheep - falls for.