That Twilight TV show in the works is an animated series

We've known for a while that Lionsgate TV was making a TV show based on Stephanie Meyers' Twilight book series, about a human named Bella and a vampire named Edward who fall in love despite age gaps and stalking and a lot of other problematic things people discussed to death at the time. The Twilight books and the movies they inspired became major cultural flashpoints in the late 2000s and early 2010s; within the fandom, you were either Team Edward or Team Jacob, the two monster men vying for Bella's affections. Among the general population, you either liked Twilight or you thought it was the worst thing to ever happen to fiction. It was a fun, weird time.

Whatever the discourse, the books and movies were huge successes, with the films raking in over $3.4 billion globally and launching the careers of actors like Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner, who played Edward, Bella and Jacob the werewolf respectively. A reboot was probably inevitable.

What's more surprising is that, according to Deadline, the TV show will be animated. Apparently that's been the plan from the start.

I like that because it feels like it gives the show more of a reason to exist. We already have a live-action adaptation of Twilight, so doing it again in TV form, while not utterly pointless, feels a little redundant. But if the show is animated, maybe it can do things the original movies couldn't. Maybe we'll all only really understand vampire baseball when we see it in animated form. I also like that it reverses a trend where streaming services like Netflix take animated shows and remake them as live-action series. Way to go against the grain, Lionsgate.

It's hard not to mention the Twilight TV series without noting that Max is working on a (presumably) live-action Harry Potter TV show. The two series are pretty different, but they're linked in the imaginations of people of a certain age, since they came out around the same time and they were both part of a wider boom in YA fantasy fiction. Plus, the final movies in the Harry Potter and Twilight series pioneered the practice of splitting books into two movies, something that continues to this day with films like Dune: Part One and Part Two.

We don't know where the Twilight show will end up, or when it might come out. Let's just enjoy the mystery for now.

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