Credit where credit is due. The decision to update Cruel Intentions to the collegiate atmosphere of fraternities and sororities was inspired. Their structure contains built-in expectations that wonderfully mirror the neo-Edith Wharton New York that hit in the 1999 film but might feel tired in our post-Gossip Girl world. The update to college also works like the oft-used porn dialogue, Now that you’ve turned 18…
This version of Cruel Intentions will not be sexualizing anyone underage. There’s just one problem: It’s not interested in sexualizing anybody.
The eight episode first season of Phoebe Fisher and Sara Goodman’s Cruel Intentions series is still about sex. Despite the change in location and expansion of characters, the overall conceit is generally the same. Rich and manipulative step-siblings make a bet that if the boy has sex with a noteworthy newcomer, the girl will have sex with him — if he fails, she gets his car. Here, those characters are named Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lucien (Zac Burgess), and Caroline’s goals go beyond chaos — she wants Lucien to seduce the Vice President’s daughter, Annie Grover (Savannah Lee Smith), so she’ll pledge to Caroline’s sorority.
But just because the mechanics of the plot are about sex that doesn’t mean the show is interested in the sex itself. The Cruel Intentions movie is one of the horniest ever. The Cruel Intentions show appears to actively work against its own eroticism. Whenever the camera should be close, the image is framed wide. Whenever sex begins, they cut away. There is minimal cleavage, sex is had with clothes on, and if you were hoping for any strings of spit, sorry, there’s barely even kissing with tongue.
If the industry is going to be trapped in a cycle of regurgitating IP, I’m not against making new choices with the same story. But as the series continued, any hope that the lack of eroticism was due to some artistic or intellectual point began to fade. It began to feel less like a choice and more like a lack of skill. Or if it was a choice, one made purely out of cowardice.
The series becomes just another teen — and early 20s! — soap opera more interested in plot mechanics than things like texture or rich characters. Eroticism doesn’t just mean graphic sex, it also means chemistry, and there is absolutely none between Caroline and Lucien. As Kathryn, Sarah Michelle Gellar oozed sexuality, drawing every character toward her with vampiric will. Sarah Catherine Hook as Caroline just feels like a standard mean girl. Her manipulations are born from narrative, not energy, and the narrative is not tight enough to pull that off.
The only characters that have chemistry are Lucien and Annie. Like the movie this is the central love story, but without Lucien’s sexual connection to Caroline, it doesn’t feel conflicted enough. The sequences where they’re ditching the secret service to give Annie a taste of normalcy are fun, but if the writers wanted to do a TV version of My Date with the President’s Daughter they could’ve taken that title instead.
Outside the main storyline, Caroline’s right-hand Cece (Sara Silva) falls for her professor (Sean Patrick Thomas who notably played Ronald in the original) and the token gay boy from the movie becomes two gay boys with a fraught little romance. It’s within these subplots that the Cruel Intentions series best reveals why it doesn’t work. The movie is mean and taboo until the end when it quickly adds some moralistic comeuppance that’s so over-the-top it feels like camp. The show attempts to be moral the whole time. It apologizes on behalf of every character except Caroline, trying to never have them cross any unforgivable lines. Not only does this make the show far less interesting, it also makes it more fucked up. When Cece’s beloved professor insists they wait to have sex until she graduates, it’s meant to be a sign that he’s a good guy. But there isn’t that big of a difference between a professor sleeping with a student vs. a professor insisting they wait six months while still spending all their time together. He might as well say: Now that you’re 22…
The Cruel Intentions movie was all about taboos and in a world where the internet is filled with incest porn, age gap porn, and just about any other power dynamic you can imagine porn, this update could’ve leaned into these dynamics to reveal something interesting about our desires. It could have lived in a fantasy space where it became even more ethically murky to relish in and reevaluate why we’re turned on by what’s forbidden. Instead it tries to ground the narrative in ways that make it fucked up in a sad way instead of fucked up in a fun way.
I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but the Cruel Intentions series made me miss Euphoria. If a show is going to be bad, I’d rather it at least be sexy. But men like Roger Kumble and Sam Levinson shouldn’t own eroticism on-screen. Two women should have been able to update this story without making it so PG-13.
When the two girls kiss here, it really does feel like they’re just practicing. Imagine if some queer perverts had stepped in and turned the spit kiss into a lesbian orgy.
The first season of the Cruel Intentions TV series is now available on Prime.
