Heathers premiere recap and review

The Heathers pilot episode turns the concept of the original film on its head, making Westerberg High School into a place where the quirky outcasts are the popular kids, and the vanilla conformists are the followers.

"Note: This recap was based on the pilot posted on the Paramount webstite. However, the actual Heathers television series has been indefinetely postponed due to the tragedy at Parkland School."

If you don’t have an identity (fat, black, queer, trans, etc.), you don’t have a brand; and if you don’t have a brand, you don’t have anything. You’re nobody.

A “nobody” is exactly what Victoria Sawyer (Grace Victoria Cox) is. The only reason Victoria is popular is because Heather Chandler (Melanie Field) says she is, and why the Heathers incorporate this “Ugg boot latte” into their clique — or why Victoria would choose to associate with them — is honestly a mystery, even to Victoria. “It’s high school,” she explains. “Why do we do anything?”

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Time and technology have made the Heathers crueler and more fatuous. Where the Heathers of the 80s would merely humiliate, the Heathers of 2018 devastate. Chandler uses her unbelievable social media presence (what small-town high schooler has 250,000 followers?) to endanger the future of a classmate over perceived racial insensitivity. When Victoria finds out, she’s angered into fat shaming the glamorously body positive Chandler in public, putting her own popularity at risk.

Enter the “overdramatic loser” JD (James Scully), whose constant use of the phrase “my dear” comes off more condescending and creepily old-fashioned than uniquely charming. He and Veronica have a late night date at the Snappy Snack Shack and then go to humiliate Chandler by sneaking into her bedroom and posting a fake selfie of her in a Nazi officer’s hat. They end up “accidentally” killing her with Nazi suicide pills that JD mistook for Nazi vomit pills. They edit the video footage of Chandlers’s ironic monologue (“dear cruel world” etc.) to make it look like a suicide.

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Chandler’s suicide makes national headlines for some reason. Back at school, the hierarchy comes crumbling down as Heathers Duke (Brendan Scannell) and McNamara (Jasmine Mathews) vie for power, only to be usurped at the last minute by Betty Finn (Nikki SooHoo). But Heather Chandler isn’t dead. No one bothered to check on her, taking her suicide post at face value. And after coughing up the corn nuts and suicide pill stuck in her throat, Chandler awakes to find that she’s become famous.

While the pilot episode was a little rocky in areas, the concept the show is running with has a lot of potential to explore a lot of different avenues. However, the suspension of disbelief is genuinely challenging when it comes to the social media presence Chandler holds and the national interest in her supposed death. There’s not a single character who knows her personally who even likes her, so why would anyone on Instagram?

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And while diversity in television is always appreciated, there’s something that feels forced and tone-deaf about how diversity is portrayed here, as if the diversity has been shoe-horned in. Then again, maybe that’s the message. In the world of Westerberg, diversity is power. The more alternative your identity is, the more powerful your brand. Even Heather McNamara pretends to be gay because just being black isn’t quite enough.