Good news for everyone who yearns for the 1990s and whose sexual coming-of-age was deeply influenced by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair: Variety reports that NBC has ordered a series based on the classic camp movie, Cruel Intentions. The television iteration of the teen melodrama is set 15 years after its original and is centered around the son of Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) and Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon), who is unfortunately named “Bash Casey.”
Here’s the truly terrible plot, via Variety:
NBC’s “Cruel Intentions” follows the beautiful and cunning Kathryn Merteuil, the character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the ’90s flick, as she vies for control of Valmont International as well as the soul of Bash Casey who is the son of her brother, the late Sebastian Valmont and Annette Hargrove. Upon discovering his late father’s legacy in a hidden journal, Bash is introduced to a world of sex, money, power and corruption he never could have imagined. (In the 1999 movie, Annette was not said to be pregnant, but she drove away at the end of the movie with Sebastian’s journal by her side after his funeral.)
The show is definitely a change in direction for NBC, which currently has a lineup of legal dramas aimed at middle-aged moms. The reboot, written by Lindsey Rosin and Jordan Ross who helmed the recent Cruel Intentions musical, sounds better suited for the CW.
Just think, there’s potentially another generation of preteen girls who will take their cues on sexual liberation from Kathryn Merteuil, the Marcia fucking Brady of the Upper East Side.