TV

‘Life’ in the balance in new drama

Just days after a young woman’s struggle with cancer got the big-screen treatment in “The Fault In Our Stars,” the premise is coming to TV in the new ABC Family drama “Chasing Life.”

The series — premiering Tuesday at 9 p.m. — centers on April Carver (Italia Ricci), a 24-year-old cub reporter at a Boston newspaper who learns that she has leukemia. The show follows how the diagnosis affects her perspective on life.

“[Exploring death] is one of the final taboos in television. People get really uncomfortable when you talk about it,” says executive producer Patrick Sean Smith (“Greek”). “But I think with younger people it’s a little bit easier.

In fact, Smith credits “TFIOS” and other high-stakes young-adult titles like “The Hunger Games” with allowing “Chasing Life” to fully embrace the cancer element. “It gave us a little more license to go further with it,” he says.

“Chasing Life” is adapted from the Mexican TV series “Terminales,” but unlike that 13-episode show, it will — as the title suggests — focus more on living than dying (writers also added a family mystery element to balance out the illness). “The show isn’t all about her fighting cancer but about her not letting the cancer ruin the life that she wants to be living,” Ricci tells The Post.

That includes April chasing scoops at work, family life with her widowed mom and rebellious younger sister, a new romance with her cute co-worker Dominic and reconnecting with her estranged uncle, who becomes her oncologist.

Besides adding levity to the more serious cancer plot, such storylines also provide fodder for additional seasons (viewers know that if April dies, the show ends).

“I don’t think our outlook is the false stakes of is she going to die in this episode,” Smith says. “I think we could very easily imagine Season 7, Season 8, April survives cancer.”

“Chasing Life” marks the biggest starring role for the 27-year-old Ricci, who studied theater at Queens University in Ontario and deferred law school to move to LA to give acting a shot (previous credits include Cartoon Network’s “Unnatural History” and the Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie “Don Jon”).

To prepare for the part of April, she did lots of research on cancer, talking to doctors, patients and survivors, including her friend “Arrow” star Stephen Amell’s mother, who is a breast cancer survivor (Ricci’s boyfriend is Amell’s actor cousin Robbie).

“I spent a lot of time with her and she physically walked me through how it felt and I used a lot of what she told me,” Ricci says.

“I really do hope the show helps take the stigma away from it. I’d never had a personal experience with cancer so I had this fear, like it was this big, dark, massive presence that I didn’t want to deal with … Shooting the show you realize that cancer only has the power that you give it and I hope people see that.”