“It was so nice to read a character who’s described as a big girl, someone who would be the teased, bullied person in the original movie,” said the new alpha bully, Melanie Field, a veteran of Broadway musicals (“Evita,” “Phantom of the Opera”). And the leader of the crew, Heather Chandler, is no longer a svelte blonde but a brunette self-described “plus-sized girl.” Doherty’s character, Heather Duke, is a gay male, while Heather NcNamara is now African-American. One of the biggest departures for former Spike lovers will be “Heathers,” which veers wildly from the original. But since the raft of allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, all traces of the Weinstein name have been scrubbed from the credits, though the company still has a financial stake in the shows.) (Both “Waco” and “Yellowstone” were high-profile entries from the Weinstein Company. There will also be many fewer showings of “Cops.” Paramount Network, which bills itself as “television’s destination for premium entertainment and storytelling,” will showcase original programming (about a third of the schedule), supplemented by TV series and feature films culled from the Viacom and Paramount vaults (“Pitch Perfect,” “The Devil Wears Prada”). The reinvention also fit it in with the corporate decision under a new chief executive to focus on six of Viacom’s bigger brands (BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., and now Paramount), at the expense of its smaller ones (TV Land, CMT, VH1 and Logo). Still, the Spike moniker (and lots of showings of “Cops”) kept the network from truly being seen as a general-audience destination. But as those revenue streams dried up, at least for a modestly rated cable channel like Spike, the network pursued a broader audience, swapping shows like “Impact Wrestling” for programs like “Lip Sync Battle” and “Tut.” When Viacom started Spike in 2003 as “The First Network for Men,” advertising from video games and male-skewing action movies was plentiful. “We’re kind of leaning into the 100 years of the movie studio,” said Keith Cox, the network’s president for development. And the network’s logo has the same iconic mountain and stars as the Paramount movie studio. Besides adaptations of other beloved movies in the Paramount vault (like “The First Wives Club,” which starred Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler and is getting the half-hour comedy treatment), there are series that feel like big movies (“Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner as the patriarch of a ranching clan) and ones that feature stars best known from movies (notably, Michael Shannon and Alicia Silverstone). Cinematic is the buzzword executives keep using to describe the newly branded network, which goes live on Thursday, Jan. The series, which debuts in March, is part of Viacom’s transformation of the formerly bro-friendly Spike TV into Paramount Network. In the halls were vending machines selling Big Fun chips, a nod to the film’s goofy boy band with sage musical advice (“Don’t do it”) about teenage suicide.Įven Shannen Doherty, a scrunchie-wearing mean girl in the original, was here, shooting a scene for the final episode of the series, in which she plays someone who should be dead but unexpectedly isn’t. There were metal detectors at the school’s entrance painted in the primary colors of the big-shouldered blazers worn by the first team of Heathers, the clique of withering Queen Bees who rule the school. For fans of the original, the effect was both familiar and dizzying. LOS ANGELES - In September, the cast and crew of the TV series “Heathers,” a reimagining of the (very) dark and violent comedy from 1989, were hard at work in the Chatsworth area of the San Fernando Valley creating an updated vision of the film’s fictional Westerburg High.
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