• “Dangerous Liaisons dangereuses” imagines a backstory for its principal characters.
• Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont’s love affair turns sour in pre-revolutionary Paris.
• Sunday marks the beginning of the eight-episode inaugural season on LIONSGATE+.

The most recent film version of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel “Les Liaisons dangereuses” imagines a backstory for its principal characters as they become entangled in a game of sex, power, and vengeance.

In the new television series, Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont’s passionate love affair turns sour in pre-revolutionary Paris. Young, impoverished, and traumatized by their past, the kindred spirits are torn apart in their pursuit of a better life, eventually transforming into morally corrupt rivals who use seduction and manipulation to destroy the lives of everyone around them.

Stephen Frears’ 1988 film “Dangerous Liaisons,” starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and 1999’s “Cruel Intentions,” starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Reese Witherspoon, were earlier adaptations of the book.

Australian actor Nicholas Denton, who portrays Valmont, told the media, “It is a prelude to what we see later with the book and the Malkovich version.”

“It’s their kind of origin story. We see them and we see why they become the way they are.”

Harriet Warner, the creator, writer, showrunner, and executive producer of the series, was inspired by a letter in the epistolary novel in which the marquise explains constructing herself to survive and negotiate the environment in which she lives.

Warner wondered who the marquise, who goes by Camille and is portrayed by Australian actress Alice Englert, was previously. To tell this story, Warner surrounded herself with a team dominated by women.

“It’s interesting because my slight reservations about coming to it was as a feminist, how to love this destructive narcissist who’s Valmont,” she said.

“As key as discovering the way into Camille was the way into Valmont, that meant that you can understand his behavior. There’s a complexity, I think, that the show allows the characters that you don’t get in the novel. In the novel you have two very spoilt people, destroying women as a game.”

Sunday marks the beginning of the eight-episode inaugural season of “Dangerous Liaisons” on LIONSGATE+.

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