I've Got the Urge to Purge
By Dustin Rowles | Posted Under Trade News | Comments (37)
I wish I’d seen this bit of news early enough to add it to yesterday’s Two Truths and a Lie because, really, who would believe a Heathers television series? Veronica, you’re pulling my dick?
But no: It’s true. Why waste a perfectly good and sacred late 80’s title on an hour-and-a-half one-off, when you can spin it into an entire series? Oh, I know why not! Because it’s the stupidest idea of the 21st century.
The television adaptation will come from Mark Rizzo (“Men in Trees,” the twice-rejected pilot “Zip”) and Jenny Bicks (“Sex and the City”) and the original characters are expected to return.
So, I ask: How does it work? I can see the Heathers clique element: Veronica infiltrating the Heathers and slowly (very slowly, over the course of seasons or, more likely, three episodes) with the assistance of the new guy, J.D. But what are they going to do? Pick one student off via fake-suicide per episode? You’d think that, at some point, maybe by episode five, the police might catch on. Are they going to save blowing up the school for the finale?
I am mystified. Also terrifying? The updated vernacular that the show will undoubtedly use, replete with text-message speak and Twitter-slang. I wonder if we could jerry-rig Martha Dumptruck’s wheelchair into a Murder-Wheelchair?
If you have to serialize a late 80s/early 90s teen comedy, at least choose Pump Up the Volume (shhhhh! don’t listen to me), which at least offers a better episodic premise: Underground high-school DJ saves depressed and disillusioned student one episode at a time. At least it makes sense, while nothing about the idea of a “Heathers” television show does.
I need a wake-up cup full of liquid Drain-O.
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Comments
Posted by: ed newman at August 28, 2009 9:23 AM
Yeah this idea blows.
Prediction: They will almost completely jettison the original movie plot and you will wind up with something closer to a watered down Mean Girls than Heathers. Unless it is on SHO or HBO, where it could develop into a giant ball of awesome.