The Bingeworthy™ Breakdown is an occasional look at new TV shows. Over 500 scripted seasons of TV are expected to air in 2018, and to help you sort the wheat from the chaff, we’re going to give you the lowdown to help you work out whether it’s worth tuning in every week for them or waiting to binge later. Today we look at “Heathers.”
“Heathers,” huh? That’s some dicey material right there. Controversial stuff.
Boy howdy, is it ever. And I’m about to dish out some real #hottakes, so get ready.
I am not looking forward to whatever is about to happen here.
Paramount Network’s “Heathers” is a modern take on the classic 1988 black comedy of the same name. That film starred Winona Ryder and Christian Slater as a couple of too-cool-for-school high school kids who set out to murder the popular girls. Now, back in 1988, the “popular girls” (as per “Heathers”) were the blonde, skinny, hot white girls whose power came from the fact that guys wanted to sleep with them and girls wanted to be them. Not so much in this reboot.
In Paramount TV’s “Heathers,” the popular girls are the queer Heather Chandler (Melanie Field); black, gay Heather McNamara (Jasmine Mathews); and gender non-binary Heather Duke (Brendan Scannell). These Heathers’ powers come not from their attractiveness but from their marginalized status — the highest possible status marker for a generation raised on Twitter progressivism.
So what we have here is a series about two attractive white kids presumably killing three members of protected minority classes.
*Backs away slowly* I want no part of this.
You have no idea just how good a call that is. When the “Heathers” trailer dropped a couple months ago, it was met with outrage and ire online, from legions of anonymous Twitterers and some mainstream publications. When the show actually premieres, watch out, because people will continue to be seriously Mad Online about it.
It’s due to this that “Heathers” need not rely solely on its actual quality to rise above the Peak TV noise. It’s actually quite a brilliant ploy by the brand-new Paramount Network: “Heathers” will get a lot of press, mostly negative, but all press is good press for yet another new cable channel seeking to distinguish itself. I mean, the official “Heathers” Twitter bio reads: “The show Twitter is calling ‘rebooted by generation sjw Crybaby cant end well.’” They’re leaning into it, hard.
Yeah, but is “Heathers” good?
It’s not good, not really. But that’s secondary. It’s not nearly as important as the fact that “Heathers” is the possibly the most subversive piece of mainstream media of the modern age. Think about it — what other show or movie so openly challenges progressive orthodoxy, which dictates that marginalized people cannot be the butt of the joke, at least not yet? It’s a bold move, and “Heathers” deserves praise and admiration for that alone.
If you actually watch the show, which I assume most of its detractors will not do, you will find that it’s mostly in line with progressive thought on the important issues. Where it deviates from heterodox Twitterism is in its very mission statement: that it’s okay to poke fun at progressivism and intersectionality. That progressive thought is not sacrosanct, that on the contrary, it’s made stronger if it can be poked and prodded in good faith by its own adherents. “Heathers” is shocking to watch at times, given that nothing like it has really been done at this level. One might hope it will be the first step toward a more forgiving, less outrage-prone viewing public.
As to the show’s artistic merits, there are significant pros and cons. Pro: this show features some of the best direction and cinematography on TV. It’s visually gorgeous, full of inspired framing choices; the music drops are exciting and help develop character and atmosphere. The season’s fifth episode is particularly ingenious, shot in video-game style first-person from the perspective of sociopath cool kid J.D. (James Scully, in a performance so bad it sinks the series. More on that in a bit).
The visual style of “Heathers” makes it a better, more self-assured version of last year’s “Tragedy Girls,” which suffered from many of the same problems as “Heathers” does, but had none of its aesthetic ambition.
“Heathers” occasionally lands an inspired piece of writing, usually in the form of a one-liner, although these are often imported straight from the source material (“well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw” is a highlight). There’s original material too, like a moment in the pilot, when Veronica Sawyer (Grace Victoria Cox doing a lackluster Winona impression) accidentally spills the vague contents of an art installation on Heather Chandler’s clothes, and provokes a brilliant “you spilled art all over my new pussy skirt!”
And now we have arrived at the cons. For every quotable line in “Heathers,” there’s a hundred cringeworthy ones. While the directors and DPs deserve enormous kudos for their work on this show, the writers leave a lot to be desired. They’re trying way too hard to match the sardonic tone of the original, to update it with a modern twist, and what they’ve ended up with is a mishmash of bad jokes, obvious gags, and terrible caricatures.
Heather Duke’s trailer-moment “oh my clit” doesn’t land. It’s not funny, it’s not clever, it’s just nothing. Everything J.D. says is either really, really dumb or really, really inane (“marriage is a wound,” “a little self-hatred is good for the soul,” “semantics, my dear.”) Unlike Christian Slater, James Scully cannot pull off a “my dear.” Characters routinely behave in completely unrealistic ways to serve the theme of a given episode. There’s a thin line between satire and stupid, and while “Heathers” occasionally gets it right, there’s a lot more stupidity on display here than successful satire.
A show can survive some bad writing, if it’s stylish, fun, and well-acted enough. Good actors can elevate bad dialogue beyond what exists on the page. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that the two leads of “Heathers” are alternately bland and bad enough to just about ruin the show entirely.
Grace Victoria Cox and James Scully are essentially doing impressions of their 1988 “Heathers” counterparts, Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. Both of the impressions are terrible, but only Scully’s is so bad as to be truly confounding. You’d imagine that in casting the new “Heathers” reboot, you’d look for actors who mirror certain qualities of the original cast, sure, but who also bring something new and exciting to the table, who have their own unique charisma to rival Ryder and Slater’s, who will make the audience excited to tune in each week. Simply put, there’s no spark here.
While not as remarkably bad, Cox is very bland, her Winona impression transparent, and her character a total mess, developmentally. Her fantasies about burying Heather Chandler alive come early and often, but are totally unbelievable and out of place. What made these scenes in the original “Heathers” work so well is that Winona’s Veronica daydreamed about killing Heather in the mundane way kids often fantasize about “killing” their bullies (or even their friends), without actually intending or wanting to kill anyone. Until, of course, the devil — in the form of J.D. — enters her life. In the new version, there’s much less to distinguish Veronica and J.D. in terms of their levels of sociopathy. Veronica is every bit as insane as J.D., and neither of them is particularly well-defined.
The rest of the cast fares significantly better, but that’s not saying a whole lot. Melanie Field comes across as totally evil as Heather Chandler. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and the one attempt to humanize her fails miserably. But her character’s primary function is to be evil, and Field nails that. Brendan Scannell is good — if not pitch-perfect — as Heather Duke, who is regularly and heartbreakingly mistreated by Heather Chandler. But the real Heather MVP (MVH?) is Jasmine Mathews, playing tragically misunderstood Heather McNamara.
Mathews, who is outstanding in the role, stands out as the one cast member who successfully manages to elevate the oft-trite material she’s been presented with. There’s a sequence involving a roller rink that left me feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach. It’s a scarily empathetic performance which will likely go completely overlooked given how mediocre everything surrounding it is.
“Heathers” suffers from repeated, indulgent repetition. Every episode features the Heathers finding new and interesting ways to be incredibly cruel to one another. You get the idea fairly early on, but it just keeps going and going, making each Heather less and less likable — even as we’re supposed to feel bad for whatever it is the other Heather is doing to hurt them.
And then there are the adults of the show. They’re a mixed bag: Veronica’s inattentive parents make for a funny duo, while Heather MacNamara’s uber-liberal parents are crushingly unfunny. Most of the school faculty are terrible cliches of old people who don’t get millennial culture (“so fat kids can be popular now?”), but theater teacher Mr. Dennis gets some good moments, thanks to a fun performance from Drew Droege. Also, Selma Blair is having the time of her life playing a drugged-out stripper.
So, is this a recommend?
It’s certainly a check-it-out. If the premise sounds appealing, if the promise of middling-to-bad writing doesn’t make you queasy, if you’re into this sort of thing, give the first episode a whirl. It’ll likely make waves regardless. [B-]
“Heathers” debuts on Paramount Network on March 7th.