Grumble: 10 Things I Hate About You… the tv show
The first series, 10 Things I Hate About You – based on the theatrical of the same name – will be executive-produced by Carter Covington (Greek) and will follow the lives of two sisters with different personalities as they start their new high school, said ABC Family officials.
ABC Family Greenlights Pilot Pair – 10/8/2008 11:00:00 AM – Multichannel News
BOO. I SAY BOO TO THIS. BOOOOOOOOOO. THUMBS DOWN + grumpy, pouty face.
Le sigh. This movie was fantastic when it came out in ’97 – I loved how smart it was.
Here’s the issue. When you have GREAT movies BASED OFF OF GREAT NOVELS, they do NOT transcend to television with the same smart/cleverness.
Case in point – CLUELESS. Clueless, based off of Jane Austen’s Emma, was a fantastic movie. Clueless the tv show should have been called Aimless, because that’s what it was. Aimless. There was no through line story, no clever adaptation – just a bunch of well-liked characters exploited in the name of beating a dead horse. They tried to revisit-the movie story line, drag it out much longer, and then scrape whatever they could out of the jokes & stereotypes & 90’s pop culture until it was a dirty mess of laundry, stained beyond repair.
Now we have 10 Things I Hate About You – based off of William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, which is one of my FAVORITE of Shakesy’s masterpieces (along with Henry IV – which I will adapt one day to script, A Midsummer’s Night Dream and Hamlet). Time to beat the dead horse. In MY opinion, the only way to save the heart of 10 Things I Hate About You is to revisit the important aspects of Taming of the Shrew and other such tales, and then cleverly adapt. Smart. Comedy. Please. But what will probably happen is that they focus heavily on the girls – building out their own version of a version. You know what they say about copies – the more you copy a copy, the less you can see clearly, and the more the vision gets blurred. In other words – crap.
Strangely enough, I like the ABC show Greek. Mainly because I was a Greek – and at times miss the hijinks, but at the same time – I laugh at how stupid they make sororities, because mine wasn’t like that (mine was the muppets, and much more silly/rowdy then the lil miss priss houses they pretend all sororities are). Plus, I’m stuck on the love triangle relationships – I always get hung up on the love triangles. Pacey, Joey, Dawson, you are missed.
Anyway, fingers crossed Carter Covington figures a way to treat 10 Things I Hate About You with enough respect and finesse to NOT completely ruin a great thing.
Izzy Neis 