Lucy Hale Lives Like She's Dying In Life Sentence Trailer

 Lucy Hale has spent her whole life living like she's dying in the new trailer for her upcoming CW show Life Sentence– until now, that is. In the series, Hale plays Stella, a woman who has spent the last eight years living with a terminal cancer diagnosis that led her to do wild things like marrying a guy she barely knows and traveling the world, only to find out that she has suddenly been cured.

The trailer begins with Stella and her new husband Wes (Elliot Knight) at a bakery, where Stella uses her cancer to get a "funeral cake." "Okay, I played the cancer card," she says. "But you have to play the hand you're dealt. After all, I am dying."

However, she is immediately told that she is not, in fact, dying, much to the relief of her and her family. The celebration, though, is brief. Stella has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life, which she had never planned for. First, she decides to do what "every millennial with a funky haircut and no college education does" and becomes a barista (a job she soon loses). She also continues to try to work things out in her relationship, despite the fact that Wes is now willing to come clean about some of the things he lied to her about to make the short time she had left the best that it could be. (Love Actually is not, in fact, his favorite movie.) "The past six months I did whatever it took to make her happy," Wes says. "How do I fit into her life now that she's not dying?" 

She also finds that there are a number of problems in her family life that everyone kept a secret from her. For one thing, her mother (Gillian Vigman) is ready to divorce her father (Dylan Walsh) because she has fallen in love with her best friend. There's also her sister Elizabeth (Brooke Lyons), who revealed that she gave up a scholarship to Columbia so that she could stay home and create a "positive emotional environment" for Stella, and her brother Aidan (Jayson Blair), who apparently uses Stella's cancer to guilt soccer moms into sleeping with him while he sells them his ADD medication. Her family is also undergoing money troubles from all they spent on Stella's care.

Still, Stella's family is there to get her through the tough times, and she quickly begins to realize that she's stronger than she thought. "So there it was," she says. "The end of my cancer movie, but the beginning of my life sentence, which was full of promise. For the first time since I found out I wasn't dying, I was truly happy to be alive." 

Erin Cardillo (Significant Mother) created the series, which also has Scrubs' Bill Lawrence attached as an executive producer. The show is being held for midseason; for now, see some other TV shows that will blow you away this year.