The broadcast television networks are rolling out announcements of their shows for the 2009-10 season this week, and ABC has one with a literary pedigree.

Eastwick, a one-hour drama, is based on John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a sexy, savvy novel of magic and feminism in a New England town in the late 1960s. The series is also based on the sexy, if not quite so smart, 1987 film, starring Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Jack Nicholson.

(The series of course has nothing to do Updike's engaging 2008 sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, in which the three female characters are in their 60s. On TV? Oh, the horror.) 

Happy as I am to see anything on the fall schedule that isn't a reality show, I'm not sanguine about Eastwick. It's described in ABC's press release as "a devilish blend of Desperate Housewives and Charmed that explores the hidden depths of women." Mm hm.

The release also notes that, as the trio of witches, Jaime Ray Newman plays "a doormat wife and mom," Rebecca Romijn "a flaky artist" and Lindsay Price "the uptight local reporter" -- an exact inversion of the original characters, who were, respectively, a hell-on-wheels single mom who could hardly remember her kids' names, a wise and warm-hearted artist, and a local reporter whose news sources were the many guys in town she was sleeping with. And devilish Darryl Van Horne, incarnated by Nicholson in top form? Canadian actor Paul Gross, so far best known here for playing a Mountie in the '90s police drama Due South. 

Still, I'm keeping an open mind. But I suspect that elegant whirring sound I hear? Updike spinning in his grave.

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