In 1999, Julia Styles, Heath Ledger, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt starred in the hip and very funny teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You. An adaptation of the Shakespeare play, The Taming of the Shrew, the film melded together plot and character elements from the Bard’s work into a refreshing teen movie.
Fast-forward to ten years later.
The movie, that originally was a play, is now a TV series on ABC Family. It’s not so much a remake of the film, but its own entity. True, the characters are similar in their personas, but there is much more advancement for growth than a movie affords its characters.
What makes the TV series different from the film? For one, the premise is flipped. In the film, Cameron (Gordon-Levitt) is a new student at Padua High. In the series, Kat and Bianca Stratford are the newbies. Bianca desperate to find immediate popularity; and Kat wanting to be left alone and do her own thing.
Not wanting to give too much away, the premiere episode also establishes the relationships between Kat and Patrick Verona, Bianca and Chastity, and Bianca and Cameron; all of which were key elements of the film in their infancy here.
The one constant is Larry Miller who plays Kat and Bianca’s father in the series as well as in the film. He provides the same fatherly advice that made him such a memorable character in the movie, and hopefully he will play an even larger role over the course of the series.
It’s tough to take a popular film and turn it into a series. It has been done successfully (Buffy, Clueless) and not so successfully (Uncle Buck). The key thing is to look at the series apart from the film. While there are plenty of comparisons that can be made, the series attempts to take things in a new direction.
10 Things I Hate About You stars Lindsey Shaw as Kat, Meaghan Jette Martin as Bianca, Larry Miller as Dr. Walter Stratford, Ethan Peck as Patrick Verona, and Nicholas Braun as Cameron.
Check out the series premiere on ABC Family Tuesday, July 7 at 8pm, followed by an encore presentation at 9:05.
Click here for Part One of this three part series for my post about my set tour of the show.
Click here for Part Two, which includes interviews with the main cast and series creator Carter Covington.
For more information on the series, visit the show’s main page by clicking here.
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