'Smallville' Alum Kristin Kreuk Cast in CW 'Beauty and the Beast' Pilot

It's just been confirmed that Kristin Kreuk, who is best-known to TV audiences for her role as Lana Lang on Smallville, has been cast in the CW's Beauty and the Beast pilot.

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Continuing with the recent tradition of rebooting fairytales for television (think: Once Upon a Time, Grimm), the new CW Beauty and the Beast series will be a modern-day retelling of the classic story, with a police drama slant. According to EW, the show "will follow New York homicide detective Catherine (Kreuk) who discovers an unlikely ally in Vincent, a military vet turned into a beast by an experiment gone wrong. Forced underground by his appearance, the Beast acts as an avenging angel – including killing the man who murdered Catherine's mother nine years before."

Hmm. Sounds interesting. As a Beauty and the Beast fan myself, (you know it's the best fairytale ever – Belle don't need no man to save her!) I only hope they don't modernize the story too much. Hopefully they'll keep in some of the more classic elements -- the mentally unstable father, Belle's/Catherine's love for reading, the silly little gifts the Beast brings her in a misguided attempt to buy her love…

The CW's Beauty and the Beast is actually a remake of a 1980's series starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman. And it's not the only TV series tackling the classic story this fall – ABC has also picked up a Beauty and the Beast series, though that one is going to be much more fantasy-based, set in an entirely different world from ours.

What do you think – will Kristin Kreuk make a good Belle?

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