TV review: Heartbreak High is a bit knowing and performative — it doesn’t feel real
The wise-ass dialogue feels like it was written by someone in their 30s, which it probably was.
I didn’t watch the original series of Heartbreak High in the 1990s, but fans of the Australian series will tell you that the gritty, grey mood was a world away from the sweetish tones in Home and Away.
This reboot feels a bit closer to Home and Away. Set in Hartley High, it’s jaunty and brightly lit and nobody is ordinary. The plot is ignited by a sex-map, drawn by friends Amerie and Harper, showing who hooked up with whom in their high-school, and what they got up to. For some reason, this is called an incest-map, and there is war when it’s discovered in a stairwell.
The headmistress decides to put all those mentioned in the map into Sex Jail, an after-hours sex education class where we learn that some of them had been ‘scissoring’. (Again, keep away from google here, your inbox will never recover. And no, that’s not a double entendre.)
I don’t know about this show. It’s not made for me obviously, and the wise-ass dialogue feels like it was written by someone in their 30s, which it probably was. It’s all a bit knowing and performative — it doesn’t feel real.
But how would I know how Australian teenagers talk to each other these days? I do know that my own 10 year old talks in a kind of detached and laconic manner sometimes, as if she’s hosting a show on her imaginary YouTube channel. So there’s a good chance the kids in the latest Heartbreak High are legit.
It helps that there is an engaging non-binary character, Darren, sad and saucy at the same time as his step-father asks him to head out for the night because his mates are coming over to watch a match. There are cookie-cutter characters as well, like the jock Spider, the hunky but creepy Dustin and the new guy in school with a good heart.
But the central relationship between Amerie and Harper is the engine of the story. For reasons that aren’t made clear in episode one, Harper is no longer talking to Amerie after the summer break. This gets physical on the first day back, when Harper bead butts her former buddy in a fight. Amerie is devastated and decides to cut her own fringe — again I’m not sure if this is something a teenage girl would do, but it seems about right for the goofy Amerie.
It’s hard to know what it’s really like to be a teenager in 2022. But Heartbreak High is written almost entirely from the kids’ point of view and I like the way they scoff at the outbreak of moral hysteria when the grown-ups learn that teenagers are having sex.
It’s not perfect, but if you’re finding it tricky to talk to your teenager, watching this show might just help.
