When it comes to remaking an old TV show, where do you draw the line between honouring the original and carving out a tone and style of your own? I’ll grant that Netflix’s Heartbreak High remake has its virtues, such as a sprightly energy and an appealing fresh-faced cast, but I’m not sure I can ever forgive the producers for taking such a blinged-out U-turn away from what made the long-running original so compelling.
The first Heartbreak High, which aired in the 1990s, had a thrilling near-verite realism and gritty, lived-in aesthetic that was perfectly befitting the authenticity of the characters, who were played by a widely diverse cast well before the diversity movement drew attention to popular culture’s long-entrenched whiteness.
The new series, by comparison, has a polished, bubble-wrapped look, a jokey tone and pat writing; it still delves into important issues relevant to young people’s lives (among them: abortion, mental health, gender politics, bullying and racial tensions) but with none of the fearlessness or courage of its predecessor.
This third and final season of the Heartbreak High redux unfolds during the gang’s last year of high school, the drama getting an early shot in the arm with a good old-fashioned muck-up day prank. For the benefit of international readers, this is usually the final day of high school for Aussie students, during which they commit various mischievous deeds that often involve tormenting younger kids (one year, for instance, I was sprayed with a water pistol filled with cat urine – ah, the glories of tradition). Like many scenes in this show, this moment has a ring of unreality, with near-naked young men from another school storming Hartley High, dressed in G-strings and colourful balaclavas (perhaps inspired by the thieving young women in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers).
A big question, teased out throughout the series (this review encompasses all eight episodes), is which character started a theme park ride, after hours at a carnival, that sent an employee into a coma. The way the writers treat this as a massive mystery feels a little forced, providing the aura of a pseudo-whodunnit, conveniently foregrounded at various points to up the stakes. Other aspects of the drama are more soap opera-like, including the complicated feelings between Amerie (Ayesha Madon) and Malakai (Thomas Weatherall), who used to be an item; romantic tensions between another couple, Spider (Bryn Chapman Parish) and Missy (Sherry-Lee Watson); and the ways some of the characters pursue their hopes and dreams – Darren (James Majoos), for instance, of becoming an actor, and Harper (Asher Yasbincek) of being a visual artist.
‘The show’s explicitly emotional moments are designed to generate feeling rather than earn it.’ Photograph: Netflix
Creator Hannah Carroll Chapman may have intended the show to be the Australian equivalent of Sex Education, which also has a heightened tone but does a much better job of coupling humour and drama, and exploring issues facing contemporary youth with frankness and sincerity (ditto for the Australian series Bump). The approach taken by the directors of Heartbreak High (Jessie Oldfield, Adam Murfet, Tig Terera, Nina Buxton) is colourful but contrived, rarely achieving a strong emotional pull. Even – and especially – during the show’s explicitly emotional moments, which are designed to generate feeling rather than earn it. It often feels painfully contrived, such as an opening montage where Amerie flips through a Hartley High yearbook, reflecting on how “high school almost killed me” while Never Tear Us Apart swells on the soundtrack. The “show, don’t tell” rule exists to guard against this kind of neat, overdetermined writing.
“Giving someone a second chance is giving yourself one,” a character says late in the piece, over a tinkling, contemplative soundtrack, making clear what many of us suspected from the start: that the show’s conclusion favours sentiment over subtlety.