Heathers (2018)

The adults are as hilariously clueless as you’d dare hope, the kids fling zingers like they’ve been mainlining All About Eve, and the series’ unexpected heart actually answers the question, “What’s your damage?” In short, Heathers slays.

It is thrilling, with wit as gentle as a chainsaw. The network has toned down the finale by cutting the prom-bombing climax, and replacing it with nothing much. The show fizzles in the home stretch, but it is easy to imagine a showrunner’s cut of “Heathers” that fills it out as a pop-surrealist masterpiece. ... The show is painfully sharp in its portrayal of the way grief is performed on social media and I.R.L. It is similarly brutal in its lampooning of national deformities.

Provocative idea. ... But with plastic characters and off-brand nastiness, neo-Heathers is an inadvertent MAGA fever dream, so cynical about identity politics that it forgets to give anyone an identity. [9 Mar 2018, p.51]

Tiresome nasty camp cartoon homage to 1989's pitch-black cult comedy. [5 Mar - 18 Mar 2018, p.13]

Paramount Network's TV take on Heathers is a one-note disappointment, taking certain surface-level detours from the movie and adding precious little scathing insight of its own.

Heathers is hardly the first 30-year-old movie to receive a modern reboot, but it's hard to think of a more misguided re-conception, one that has updated the premise -- in a clumsy attempt to be provocative -- in wholly muddled and off-putting ways.

It wasn't worth salvaging what remains a repugnant, mean-spirited attempt at satire that uses smug wokeness as a hall pass to play into every offensive stereotype imaginable.