Paramount's problematic 'Heathers' TV remake should've just stayed dead

Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling, but it wasn't enough to snuff out "Heathers." 

Earlier this summer, Paramount Network took a chainsaw to the long-troubled TV show, adapted from the 1988 cult classic about teenage outcasts (Winona Ryder and Christian Slater) who plot to kill the cool kids in school.

Initially developed for TV Land before it moved to newly rebranded sister network Paramount, the pitch-black comedy was met with scathing reviews and even more unfortunate timing: Less than a month before its planned March debut, 17 students and staff members were killed by a gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Paramount announced it would delay the series premiere out of respect for the victims, before deciding to ax the show altogether following another school shooting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

But earlier this month, the cable channel had a change of heart, and opted to burn off an edited version of the show over five consecutive nights starting Thursday (10 EDT/PDT). The reworked season cuts out two major scenes depicting violence in a high school, one of which involved dozens of students being killed in a bomb explosion on prom night. 

But 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. 

The film cast conventionally attractive white actresses to play loathsome popular clique The Heathers (led by Shannon Doherty), who could raise or ravage their classmates' reputations with the snap of a well-manicured finger. Its TV adaptation attempts to subvert the original's group of bullies by making megalomaniac queen bee Heather Chandler (Melanie Field) a heavyset girl, whose dutiful cohorts (still named Heather) are a conniving male (Brendan Scannell) who identifies as gender-queer and a biracial girl (Jasmine Mathews) who's pretending to be gay. 

Taking on the Ryder and Slater roles with far less spark, Grace Victoria Cox and James Scully play seething misfits Veronica and J.D., who accidentally murder Chandler (or so they think) in the first episode. As the remaining Heathers wrestle with Betty (Nikki SooHoo), a once-unpopular Asian-American student, for power over the student body, the show, perhaps inadvertently, becomes about two bitter white kids attempting to take their minority classmates down a peg — an uncomfortable message at any time, let alone in 2018. 

By vilifying its plus-sized and LGBTQ characters, "Heathers" also winds up emulating the self-possessed, fake-woke behavior it's supposed to be satirizing. When the male Heather catches a member of the posse hooking up with a teacher, he remarks that the head Heather is going to "(poop) herself skinny" when she hears the news.

And when Veronica and J.D. stage Heather's murder as an apparent suicide, a group of faculty members flippantly marvel over the school's progressive new pecking order: "Fat kids can be popular now," one says, while others note how "gay and black kids are over now" and Asian students "never really popped." 

Despite judicious edits, gratuitous violence remains, including another major character's graphic suicide that makes "13 Reasons Why" look tasteful by comparison. Like many of the show's other worst bits, it's meant to shock and provoke uncomfortable laughs, but only comes across as crass. 

We'd sooner recommend taking a croquet mallet to your TV remote than watching this woefully misguided "Heathers," which goes down worse than a days-old slushie.