When Stella Abbott finds out her terminal cancer is cured, she is going to have to learn to live with all the choices she made when she decided to "live like she was dying". As she adjusts to her post-cancer world, she learns how her husband and family must also deal with the self-destructive choices they made to help Stella enjoy what they thought were her final years.
The series was created by Erin Cardillo and Richard Keith for The CW as a midseason entry during the 2017–18 television season. They are also executive producers on the series along with Oliver Goldstick, Bill Lawrence, Jeff Ingold, and director Lee Toland Krieger. The show is produced by In Good Company, Doozer Productions, CBS Television Studios and Warner Bros. Television and filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The series is set in the fictional town of Asheville, Oregon. The CW officially ordered Life Sentence to series on May 10, 2017. In January 2018, the network announced the premiere date of Life Sentence on March 7, 2018. On March 30, 2018, The CW announced that Life Sentence would move to Fridays at 9:00 pm, which began with the sixth episode.
Casting
In late January 2017, Lucy Hale was cast as Stella Abbott, followed in February by the casting of Jayson Blair as her older brother, Aiden, and Dylan Walsh as her father, Peter. On February 24, 2017, Gillian Vigman and Brooke Lyons were cast as Ida and Elizabeth, Abbott's mother and sister, respectively. During March 2017, it was announced that Elliot Knight and Carlos PenaVega had joined the cast as Wes, Abbott's husband, and Diego, her brother-in-law, respectively. During September 2017, Riley Smith was cast in the recurring role of Dr. Will Grant, a rough-around-the-edges oncologist with a secret soft spot for his patients.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds an approval rating of 37% based on 19 reviews, and an average rating of 4.47/10. Its critical consensus reads, "Life Sentence avoids asking tough questions about serious issues, settling instead for a cloying sweetness." On Metacritic, which assigns normalized rating to reviews, the series has a weighted average score of 49 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
