Lacey Chabert. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Arise, Regina George – your time has come once more, now with one-liners about TikTok and slut-shaming. Last week, the trailer for the forthcoming Mean Girls reboot was released to an unsuspecting public, complete with the tagline: “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls.” Your mother’s? Tina Fey’s teen comedy was released 19 years ago. Unless my mother was a child bride, I’m not sure the marketing department thought this one through.
This reaction has, predictably, been framed in the press as millennials having a meltdown over being called old and out of touch. I’m not quite sure that’s what is going on. Part of the backlash against the trailer is based on the unoriginality of its premise; the sense that it is retreading old territory without saying anything substantively new. When Mean Girls was first released, its knowing humour was a refreshing antidote to overtly sexualised gross-out movies such as American Pie and Road Trip. Here was a high-school film that preached the merits of defeating the bullies; one that teenage girls could watch without being subjected to casual misogyny and smutty jokes about flutes. But these days, all comedies sound a little like Mean Girls. Fey’s comedy style, honed to bulletproof precision on 30 Rock, is all over similarly irreverent but feelgood shows such as Ted Lasso and Schitt’s Creek. Call it the Tina Fey gag-industrial complex: after all, what is Moira Rose’s wig collection in Schitt’s Creek but the spiritual heir to the Mean Girls line “her hair is full of secrets”?
A charitable interpretation of Fey’s remake is that she wanted to correct the heinous Asian stereotypes of the original, including an extended joke that involves a gym teacher having an affair with two Vietnamese students. The less charitable interpretation is that updating an old franchise with vaguely current references and a few songs – the remake is based on the Tony-nominated musical adaptation – is easier than coming up with another hit that can comfortably stand alongside Heathers and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the canon of great teen movies. With apologies to John Hughes, “She doesn’t even go here!” is still far more quotable than “Bueller? Bueller? … Bueller?”
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