TNT on Monday handed a pilot order to Constance, a “darkly humorous, veneer-stripping” drama starring Elizabeth Shue as a woman refusing to fade into obscurity.
The actress will play Constance Young, a former beauty queen-turned-small town bureaucrat whose life is thrown into turmoil after her husband’s mysterious death. Realizing she and her family are on the verge of financial ruin, Constance turns to cooking the books at City Hall, while simultaneously trying to reinvent herself through the hyper-competitive world of direct-sales cosmetics.
The pilot, which counts Robert Downey Jr. among its executive producers, will be written by K.C. Perry (The Originals) and directed by Jesse Peretz (GLOW). And it isn’t TV’s only beauty queen-centric project: Netflix’s Insatiable, which stars Debby Ryan as a bullied teen who becomes a pageant contestant, drops on Friday, Aug. 10, while Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones has signed on to play a ruthless pageant coach in Facebook Watch’s dark comedy Queen America.
