The second season of Netflix’s Heartbreak High reboot begins with Carrie-esque visions of a school formal erupting in flames, as if to say: this season will be louder, busier, and more sensational than the first. And perhaps racier: within the first half-hour, the protagonist – Hartley High student Amerie (Ayesha Madon) – has had sex at school.
Comparably indelicate moments from the original production, created by the late, great Michael Jenkins, came with a sting: the show dipped in quality along its 200+ episode arc but it was originally as much social realism as soap opera, with a streetside energy that felt raw, unfiltered and a bit dangerous – like smoking your first cigarette.
Netflix’s series, created by Hannah Carroll Chapman, is starkly different: polished, upbeat, and performative. Plenty of moments make you think: “Huh? Would somebody really do that?” One takes place in the first episode, when a student (Brodie Townsend) drops his weed-infused gummies on the ground and, instead of picking them up, scarfs them all down. It’s obvious from a scripting perspective why he does this – to trigger wild wastoid humour, culminating with the kid proclaiming that he’s going to cut his own penis off.
This scene, like many others, is neither drama nor comedy; you don’t laugh along and you don’t take it seriously. Others – for instance when Amerie’s bestie Harper (Asher Yasbincek) experiences a hallucination of a creepy man staring at her, en route to school – are clearly intended to have an impact. Yet they barely register amid the noise and haste. The tone is hyper-real, borderline cartoonish. Both the show and the characters seem desperate to impress; there’s so much posturing. Everybody has a shtick – even the principal, “Woodsy”(Rachel House).
Returning students from the first season include Amerie’s on-and-off romantic interest Malakai (Thomas Weatherall) and her friends Darren (James Majoos) and Quinni (Chloe Hayden), who is autistic. New enrolments include country kid “Rowan from Dubbo” (Sam Rechner), plus there’s a new teacher: Angus Sampson’s macho head of PE, Timothy Voss, a character perhaps inspired by Tony Martin’s rugby coach in the 90s production, who provided a conservative counterpoint to the school’s generally socially progressive teachers.
Sampson’s rambunctious and increasingly irritating performance, again, can’t be taken seriously – nor is it funny ha-ha. Generally speaking the younger cast are pretty good, bringing some verve and colour, though they are of course at the whims of the writing and direction.
The humour gets a bit cringe when the frame contracts to 4:3 and switches to monochrome to launch a campy noir spoof, relating to a quasi-whodunnit plot thread about a prankster terrorising Amerie. Her own behaviour is often morally dubious but the writers don’t want us to seriously consider that she might just be … bad. “I’m really trying to be a better person,” she says at one point; it rings hollow.
Compare this to the more earnest Bump, which does a fine job making us feel the fundamental decency of its protagonist, despite her erratic behaviour and immaturity. And also to the under-appreciated Australian series Why Are You Like This, which provocatively foregrounds cruel zoomers unafraid to exploit ever-changing social mores.
You can sense the Heartbreak High writers wanting to satirise these mores; instead they arrive at a kind of flaccid comedic both-siderism. One student, Gemma Chua-Tran’s Sasha, screeches about the importance of vegan food and pronouns, while on the other side of the cultural divide, boys embrace Voss’s new “Cum Lords” club, which involves “manning up” by consuming animal carcass and embracing retrograde notions of masculinity. For the first five episodes (what I’ve watched so far) the writers don’t take sides – clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right, inferring that common sense is some place else.
That perspective didn’t sit right with me, and the show’s mocking undertones don’t allow for genuine social debate. The original production did a great job turning Hartley High into a microcosm of society; a bubbling cauldron of drama and conflict. Despite ramping up the colour, bling and sensationalism, this new series turns the temperature down.
Both seasons of Heartbreak High are streaming on Netflix globally
