New season of Aussie teen drama will be ‘unwholesome and rebellious’

“It’s not going to be a facsimile of the original,” she says. “We want to give this new generation their own version. Australian teens haven’t had their stories told in this way for a long time.”

A spin-off of the 1993 Australian film The Heartbreak Kid, Heartbreak High aired on Channel Ten between 1994 and 1996 before moving to the ABC, where its final season was broadcast in 1999. Set in the fictional secondary school Hartley High, its storylines addressed issues of teenage sexuality, pregnancy, racism and drug use.

Heartbreak High was a seminal cultural moment for so many of us.

Netflix’s Australian content chief, Que Minh Luu

In her review of the show’s debut season, Age television critic Debi Enker praised its “bold and confident” writing.

“One of the most gratifying aspects is its clear choice of grit over glamour,” Enker wrote. “Perhaps the most notable divergence from the bulk of local drama is the series’ multi-cultural core … given the considerable constraints of a 6.30pm timeslot, it still manages to pack a solid dramatic punch.”

Luu wants the new season to have a similarly “unwholesome and rebellious” feel, albeit with a contemporary execution.

“Heartbreak High landed on the scene in a way that was provocative, aggressive and loud,” she says. “But the qualities that made it so groundbreaking in the 90s are almost par for the course now. That’s not to say there aren’t universal stories and journeys that teenagers go through but the way they play out [in the new season] might be a little different.”

Heartbreak High isn’t the first popular 1990s program revived by Netflix; over the past few years, it has also launched “reimagined” versions of Gilmore Girls, Full House and The Baby-Sitters Club while rival content platforms have rebooted Roseanne, Will & Grace and Murphy Brown.

Casting for the series is yet to begin. Produced by Fremantle Australia and Dutch production company NewBe, it will launch globally on Netflix in 2022.

“I’m a child of the 90s so of course I watched Heartbreak High like everyone else,” Luu says. “It was a seminal cultural moment for so many of us. When you look at the way people talk about it now, you can see how much it meant to them.”