Nora Roberts and Lifetime team up for the second series of The Nora Roberts Collection. It's romance novel TV with four made-for-Lifetime movies based on Roberts' best-selling books, Northern Lights, Midnight Bayou, High Noon and Tribute. Midnight Bayou premieres tonight at 9PM, and you can watch High Noon (4/4) and Tribute (4/11) on the next two Saturday nights. If you missed Northern Lights, you can buy it at iTunes.

According to our friends at Wikipedia, Nora Roberts has been writing romance novels since 1981, has sold over 280 million copies (damn!) of her books and was the first author to be inducted into the (not kidding) Romance Writers Hall of Fame. (Nora mentions that she uses the Internet to do the majority of her research...so why shouldn't we?)

This is the second time Roberts and Lifetime have teamed up to dramatize some of her novels. It would seem that her fans all weren't flying high with the last set of adaptations, so she's been a bit more involved for this go 'round. "I learned from the first time.  That was a brand-new process to me, when we did the first series.  So, with this one, I knew a little more, and so maybe I had a little more input -- or learned to recognize where I wanted to have input a little more.  And, as they were before, the producers and the screenwriters were wonderful about taking that input into consideration."

Although she was more involved with this set of films, she says she didn't get too deep behind the scenes or involved in casting at all. "When they told me that they had Faye Dunaway for Odette, I was so excited and beyond thrilled.  I mean, we are talking the Faye Dunaway Faye Dunaway. And one of my movies?  This is amazing to me.  And I was able to screen the movie, and she is, as one would expect, just amazing," she said, almost sounding like a Faye Dunaway fanboy.

Photo Credit: Skip Bolen, Lifetime Networks, 2009

The series got a little goosing with Northern Lights co-stars Eddie Cibrian and Leann Rimes allegedly in an affair straight out of one of Roberts' novels. Both Cibrian and Rimes are married to other people and, of course, denied it all. The timing was interesting since it broke just days before Northern Lights debuted. Coincidence?

Photo Credit: Dan Power, Lifetime Networks, 2009

So far Jerry O'Connell, Lauren Stamile, Faye Dunaway, Emilie de Ravin, Ivan Sergi, Cybill Shepherd, Brittany Murphy or Jason Lewis haven't been linked with any co-stars. It's Hollywood baby, so you can never rule anything out.

Wouldn't that make a great romance novel? Two pretty actors fall in love on the set while adapting a romance novel for TV. I want credit when that one is written.

As for the films, you can see every so-called plot twist and turn coming from a mile away, but that won't make these flicks any less enjoyable to the legions of very loyal fans Roberts has out there.
 
Check out the Nora Roberts page at Lifetime's website for more or watch the video below and get Nora's take on Midnight Bayou.