‘Van Helsing’: CBS Working on New Present Day Set TV Series!!

Literature’s most famous monster hunter is coming back to TV. A new procedural series centered around a contemporary take on Dracula‘s Abraham Van Helsing is coming to CBS. Deadline reports that Van Helsing is currently in development at the network.

The new series will be set in the present day, and will feature supernatural avenger Van Helsing working alongside his ex-lover, FBI special agent Mina Harker (another reference to Bram Stoker‘s 1897 novel), to solve New York City’s most horrifying crimes. The series, which landed at CBS after a competitive auction, is the brainchild of British screenwriter and novelist Jonathan Lee. Lee is currently working on Netflix‘s Lockerbie series, which will dramatize the events of the deadly 1988 airline bombing; Colin Firth is set to star as the father of one of the bombing’s victims. Van Helsing will come with a serious procedural pedigree; Rob Doherty, who created Elementary, another CBS series that recontextualized a classic character of Victorian-era literature as a modern-day crime-solver, will executive produce the series. Carl Beverly and Sarah Timberman are also attached to executive produce.

Who Is Abraham Van Helsing?

In Stoker‘s novel, Van Helsing is a Dutch professor who is contacted by Dr. John Seward regarding the curious condition of a woman named Lucy Westernra. Van Helsing soon concludes that she has been bitten by a vampire, and after slaying the undead Lucy, he helps Seward and his allies defeat the creature responsible for her fate: Dracula. Van Helsing’s role is considerably enhanced in the various screen adaptations of Dracula; although vampires are just one of the many subjects he is an expert on in the novel, many adaptations make him a seasoned vampire hunter and a man of action, contrary to his depiction as an older man in Stoker’s book.

A number of noted actors have played Van Helsing over the years; Edward Van Sloan in the original Bela Lugosi Dracula; Peter Cushing, opposite Christopher Lee‘s Dracula in Hammer‘s Dracula films; Anthony Hopkins, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Christopher Plummer, as a centuries-old Van Helsing kept alive via vampire blood transfusions in Dracula 2000; and Hugh Jackman as an action-hero version of the character in 2004’s would-be franchise starter Van Helsing. Willem Dafoe is set to play the Van Helsing-inspired Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz in Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu later this year.