Amazonit’s new Cruel intentions TV series are completely useless, which isn’t the worst sin, but it’s not a great virtue either.

Roger Kumble’s 1999 film of the same title reprises the frequently adapted film by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Dangerous Liaisons and gave it a modern spin that, at the very least, included much of what was so obviously tortuous about it. The film delivered satisfying, dirty fun in a tight 97 minutes, with a spectacular cast that easily smoothed out all the bumps in the thematically confusing story.

The Amazon series by Phoebe Fisher and Sara Goodman takes the powerful premise, with its backstabbing and sexual twists, and above all manages to extend it over an eight-episode season – and probably beyond, since very little are resolved by the finale. Its attempts to update the already updated tale are mostly hollow, and its ensemble of pretty young actors is mostly forgettable.

It’s vaguely watchable on its terms Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, and for all its excesses of elongation, individual episodes stay blithely under 45 minutes. But in a world where multiple iterations of Gossip Girl have been trashier successfully, the long run Greek more generally sympathetic and topical and The sex lives of female studentswhich returns this week for its third season, much funnier, I did not find a single surprise, nor performance, nor idea to give it Cruel intentions has no value in itself.

Television should really aspire further than just giving the audience a brand they recognize and saying, “If you liked this thing before, here’s the thing you liked, but less good and more.” » Too often, this is not the case.

This time around the action has been moved from the high school to the completely nondescript Manchester College, which is apparently a pretentious outpost for the scholarly elite, but lacking in visual opulence. The narrative takes place primarily in two Greek houses and a few dorms, so when the series’ descriptions mention that the school is “a university adjacent to Washington, D.C.,” my response is halfway between “prove it” and “so what?” The series was filmed in Ontario and could take place anywhere, but it’s usually nowhere.

Caroline Merteuil (Sarah Catherine Hook) is the ascendant president of Delta Phi, which has been her lifelong ambition, in part because she longs to prove herself to her lobbyist mother (Claudia de Claire Forlani), former president of Delta Phi. As a new academic year begins in which no one takes classes, Caroline faces a potentially big problem: a hazing incident the previous spring has put the entire Greek system in danger. Oh no!

But Caroline, a great manipulator, has a plan. She believes that if she and Delta Phi can recruit Annie Grover (Savannah Lee Smith), daughter of the Vice President of the United States, to join the chapter, they will have too much influence to disband. Although I could list half a dozen things about this basic principle that make no sense, “who cares?” would be the biggest.

In order to lure Annie, Caroline enlists the help of her half-brother Lucien Belmont (Zac Burgess), a lizard-like sex tape aficionado (unsuccessfully hooking early Soderberghs on the show’s influences) and treasurer of the Alpha-affiliated fraternity. Gamma Zeta, to seduce Annie. What Lucien sleeping with Annie would actually do to keep the Greek system in place is unclear, but Caroline promises him that if he succeeds in his mission, he can sleep with her for an hour. If he fails to woo the somewhat virginal Annie, Caroline gets his car back.

Without the stupid Greek stuff, that is, of course, completely the plot of the movie. Which is all well and good, but anyone with even peripheral knowledge of any of the source documents may have already noticed a flaw. The wager at the basis of the story is designed to reflect the venal emptiness of the upper class. These characters use each other like pieces on a chessboard, half out of a desire for base revenge and half out of sheer boredom. It’s a game, and no one cares how many lives are destroyed. Here, what Caroline asks of Lucien is only a favor, and one that really benefits both of us. The bits “having sex with your brother-in-law” and “a luxury vintage automobile” are superficial additions to what is otherwise a season-long arc of Greek.

Why focus on the Greek system, anyway? Well, it’s a much less interesting but differently stratified hierarchy to replace the wealth of New York’s Upper East Side or pre-Revolution France. For what purpose? Unclear. For reasons that are completely underdeveloped, Cece (Sara Silva), Caroline’s loyal lackey, accepts a job as a technical assistant to a professor (Hank Chadwick, played by Sean Patrick Thomas, who was in the first Cruel intentions film) teaching a course on “Fascism, Yesterday and Today”. She gives an extraordinarily flimsy reason for wanting to work with him, but the truth is that someone thought this was an opportunity to talk about abuse of power and resistance to that abuse, and to try to compare the Caroline’s leadership style with that of Hitler and Mussolini.

This is also the closest thing to the new Cruel intentions it’s about having an angle – even if, as executed, it doesn’t particularly sound like 2024, despite our general cultural conversation about the encroachment of fascism in recent months. Is there anything to be said about the intersection of sexual abuse and power in 2024? Look no further than the cabinet evolution of the ascendant presidential administration to remind you that the answer is yes. But it’s not #MeToo Cruel intentions.

Say what you want about Goodman and Fisher’s previous Amazon adaptation of a ’90s Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle, 2021 I know what you did last summer – at least there was an instant twist that announced it wouldn’t be what you expected from the brand.

Compared to the film, that of Amazon Cruel intentions has a bit more swearing and a slightly more enlightened focus on its gay characters. But there’s absolutely no sense that the creators have found a current conversation they want to hang the series on, a novelistic approach to put a new spin on the story, or an attitude about the dangers of being a young person at a time. overly publicized era which could give it a new identity. Even the references and slang in the scripts, while periodically sharp and funny, sound filtered through a writers’ room full of millennials, rather than organic to college-aged people in today’s reality.

The strange thing is that even though the thread of “Fascism, Then and Now” falls somewhere between closed ears and completely inappropriate, it was my favorite aspect of the series – partly because it’s the only element that doesn’t pander to “iconic” moments. and costumes and lines from a 25-year-old movie, and largely because in a cast of undistinguished performances, Silva was responsible for most of my laughs and the only emotional connection I felt to anything either. She plays Cece as a wounded, fast-talking eccentric from an Amy Sherman-Palladino series, and it works. Plus, there’s actually a little chemistry, even if inappropriate, between Cece and the professor. A very little.

There’s a certain legitimacy conveyed by the adult corner of the cast, including Thomas, Forlani, John Tenney as a congressman described as a conservative but with no evidence of anything, and Adam Arkin, who plays the stern Dean threatening the Greek system in the film. first and then never again. Arkin, not coincidentally, directed this episode. It’s the only one with an appreciable visual style – lots of tracking shots through fraternity and sorority houses – and the only one that doesn’t make the locations/settings feel claustrophobic and cheap.

As for the young cast? Besides Silva, I thought John Harlan Kim, as the gay Alpha brother who seems to be Caroline’s equal and isn’t, was having fun. Otherwise, blandness reigns. Hook looks like a combination of Cruel intentions star Reese Witherspoon and Greek star Spencer Grammer, but his performance is Queen Bee 101. It’s better than Burgess, who meets an affected brat instead of the sleazy Lothario the role demands. It’s very rare that on-screen siblings not giving any impression of wanting to rip each other’s clothes off is a negative, and yet here we are.

THE Dangerous Liaisons the formula requires heat. This requires punches of betrayal and manipulation. It can lend itself to drama, camp or dark comedy. But it should make you feel something other than, “Seriously, this again?”