Revenge premiered 10 years ago today: Read an oral history

Variety

The four-season 2011-2015 ABC drama created by Mike Kelley and starring Emily VanCamp and Madeleine Stowe premiered on Sept. 21, 2011 with a storyline loosely based on Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. "I met with Channing Dungey, who went on to become the president of ABC," says Kelley. "We bonded over our love of nighttime soaps and lamented the fact that it had been missing from the landscape for so long. ABC said, 'Look, we are really missing that big soap opera that we talked about.' So, I stopped and I thought, 'I don’t know if we’ve ever really grounded anything in a historic great book. I started going through my favorites and landed on The Count of Monte Cristo. While Edmund’s character would’ve been interesting, I also wanted to make sure I was hitting the demographic that ABC was aiming for, which was younger and female. So, I basically took the Count and made him a Countess, and that was how it all began." Kelley also remembers casting VanCamp -- over Adrianne Palicki and Sara Paxton -- after watching her on Brothers & Sisters.