The original Heartbreak High was a cult favourite teen soap, dripping with emblematically Nineties trappings: long, unwashed hair, a patchwork of plaid shirts, a dingy teen hangout run by an affectionate crank. Its depiction of Sydney life was gritty. The brooding cousin of longer-running Aussie soaps like Neighbours (RIP) and Home and Away (somehow still kicking), it arrived in the UK post-teatime with a cigarette dangling defiantly from its lip. Just saying the words “Heartbreak High” in the presence of a person who grew up on it can provoke long odes to the Hartley High student they most idolised (Oh, Drazic).
It’s nostalgia so pure that I’m astonished it took Netflix this long to reboot the series. The new version keeps the straggly hair and plaid shirts, but adds sex, smartphones and social media. It’s a global hit, with more than 33 million hours of viewing time as of Wednesday. Gone is the exacting verisimilitude of OG Heartbreak High, replaced with hyper-speed teen patter and Netflix’s signature glossy shellac. But the central plot? Well, that remains absurdly intriguing.
This Heartbreak High opens with the discovery of a wall map that connects the students of Hartley High to each other according to a hyper-specific sex key. A wavy line between names denotes oral sex. A double unbroken line indicates hand-stuff only. In an act of ingenious forethought, loved-up couples are assigned open circles, which the map-maker fills in when a break-up occurs. If the map wasn’t such a disgusting intrusion into people’s lives, you’d have to congratulate the geography teacher of the kid who created it. Cartography is not yet a lost art.
The map is hastily painted over, but the rest of the eight-episode series is dedicated to chronicling, with zippy energy, the fallout. Amerie takes all the blame for creating the map – a selfless deed, yes, but actor Ayesha Madon manages to imbue the character with annoying self-pity. Outrageously, though, punishment is doled out evenly among everyone whose name appeared on it. The sexually active teens are rounded up into a special detention for kids who technically haven’t broken any school rules. The headteacher brands the sessions “sexual literacy tutorials” – SLTs for short. Or, as the kids come to call them, “sluts”.
The detention scene is all too familiar. In John Hughes’s Eighties classic The Breakfast Club, a day-long Saturday detention brings a group of misfits – a jock, a nerd, a princess, etc – into peculiar harmony. Episodes of US teen shows Dawson’s Creek, Riverdale, and I Am Not Okay with This all borrowed the Breakfast plot to fuel their own dramas. But what happens in Heartbreak High’s “sex jail” doesn’t bring the ragtag group of delinquents together. In fact, they spend most of the sessions ragging on each other in Antipodean slang (I will confess that this American looked up “chat”, which Urban Dictionary says is catch-all Sydney shorthand for anything that sucks) and calling Amerie “map bitch” (I confess I laughed – it’s just so straightforward).
What the detentions accomplish, to hilarious effect, is portraying the gulf between the students and the teachers. “Listen, peeps, we’re not dumb,” says Jojo (Chika Ikogwe), an English teacher with big “I’m not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom” energy. “We know a lot of you are sexually active.” Over the season, she and the head come up with a variety of enrichment activities that teach the kids absolutely nothing about respecting each other. For example, a lesson about the dangers of sexting leads a student to object to the curriculum of “body-shaming”. In attempting to meet them halfway, Jojo ends up teaching the class how to take safer, more inventive nudes that are harder to trace back. “You could even have some fun with it. Wear a disguise, a mask, or a costume,” she suggests.
In another episode, Jojo brings in cops to speak to the students about sex and responsibility. If you can’t beat them, scare them. But these kids aren’t scared; they don’t even recognise police officers as a source of authority. When one officer reveals that an injury compelled him to retire from the force and take up this kind of teaching engagement instead, a student raises a hand: “Did you injure yourself from over-policing a marginalised community?” A woke dialogue generator could have scripted it.
For all the diversity among the kids along the lines of gender, race, and sexuality, they’re all fluent in the same teen argot, in which every sex act, however obscure, has a name, astrology is serious, and self-helpisms are real speech. When Amerie tries to defend herself, a rightfully incensed friend tells her gravely: “I think you need to do some work on yourself.” It’s not flat writing, I suspect. This is what a generation of kids raised in constant communication with each other sounds like if you add a writerly polish.
Now, in a very modern recursion, a show that speaks TikTok’s language is fuelling it. TikTok videos with the show’s hashtag have been viewed more than 200 million times. In the first random clip I clicked on – a scene in which a teenage girl with a buzz cut is told to “pack it up Eleven” – a commenter observed, “They went through TikTok comments writing this.”
It’s in the compulsory SLT scenes, though, that the students’ TikTokese brushes up against the outside world – and that the teachers begin to venture into theirs. Jojo tells Map Bitch that when she was in year 9, the other students called her “Le Crak” – an unfortunate consequence of getting caught with a packet of Le Snak in, well, you can guess where. TikTok might be new, but some things – like teen cruelty – never change.
