If TV Land hasn’t settled on a tag line for the new show they’re developing, we humbly suggest “How did they ever make a TV show of Heathers?” According to Variety, the network has ordered a pilot of a series based on the best (and only) black comedy about teen suicide and high school massacres. The 1988 film was directed by Michael Lehmann from a script by Daniel Waters and starred Winona Ryder as Veronica Sawyer, an unhappy member of the Heathers, the most popular clique at her high school. After befriending charming sociopath J.D. (Christian Slater), she participates in several murders, inadvertently starts a wave of suicides, and emboldens J.D. to try to blow up the school during a pep rally. It’s one of the all-time great black comedies, spawned enough slang to be cited 11 times in the Oxford English Dictionary, and is impossible to imagine making during the unending wave of school massacres that started with Columbine. But here’s to TV Land for giving it a go.
Jason Micallef, who wrote the 2008 Nicholl Fellowship winner Butter, wrote the pilot, while Sleeping With Other People writer-director Leslye Headland will direct it. TV Land’s version is a half-hour comedy, and, intriguingly, planned as an anthology like American Horror Story. If it makes it to multiple seasons, each season will be built around a different setting and a different group of popular, horrible women named Heather. Heathers in high school, Heathers at an office, Heathers in space: It’s all possible. Completely missing from Variety’s account of the new series is any word of J.D. or the blow-up-the-school plot, which may not bode well. As Alan Zilberman pointed out at the Atlantic back in 2014, the unrelenting bleakness of the original film is what made it work to begin with (and why the more upbeat off-Broadway musical version released that year was, in his words, “a mere Glee episode about suicide.”) In fact, TV Land’s Heathers may need a blacker sense of humor than the original, because it starts at a considerable disadvantage. What’s the basic cable version of “fuck me gently with a chainsaw?”
