Helmed by Veronica Mars showrunner Rob Thomas, Les Miserablesis set to become a modern tale about “a brilliant lawyer running a legal exoneration program who fights to evade the consequences of his own unjust conviction many years before.”Most people’s reaction to this will be something along the lines of, “Why would anyone even do that?” On the whole, fans don’t like it when people mess around with their beloved canon, particularly when it looks like something is going to be “Hollywoodized.”

But while Les Miserables does have its purists, the online fandom is weirdly unattached to the original 19th-century source text. Most of the fanfic is dedicated to AUs (Alternate Universe stories) where the characters are transposed into a different setting. And the most popular scenario in Les Miz fandom is modern-day AUs, the exact thing that Rob Thomas is planning to make into a TV show. In other words, unlike the negative reactions prior to the release of Sherlock and Elementary, this show already has a potential audience of enthusiastic fans.

It remains to be seen just how far into the fanfic zone Thomas’s adaptation will go. For example, the TV series seems (from Deadline.com’s sketchy description) to center around Jean Valjean, while most Les Miz fanfic focuses on the young revolutionaries, “Les Amis de l’ABC”. On Archive of Our Own, half of the 6400-plus Les Miz fics are tagged with the pairing Enjolras/Grantaire, a relationship between the revolutionary leader and an alcoholic, misanthropic follower who eventually dies by his side on a Parisian barricade… [READ MORE]