Pretty in Pink: The TV Series | The Concept

On the most recent episode of the Nerd Lunch Fourth Chair Army Invasion, I pitched an idea for turning John Hughes' teen movies into a TV show. I titled my imaginary show Pretty in Pink, but it's really about all the characters from Hughes' fictional Shermer High in Shermer, Illinois. Hughes set his teen movies there, but never tried to create a serious, shared universe. So that's what I tried to do.

I'm a huge fan of these movies and a huge fan of shared universes and making connections between things, so I've always thought this would be a fun experiment. The podcast finally gave me the motivation to figure out how it could work. And while I'm really happy with how the podcast episode turned out, I didn't have time to flesh out the idea as much as I wanted to. Which brings me to this first in a series of posts where I try to do just that.

John Hughes made six teen movies between the years of 1984 and 1987: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful. That's a span of four years, which serendipitously turns out to be a high school career. So it's pretty easy to imagine someone starting at Shermer High as a freshman in the 1983-84 school year, who was there during the events of all six movies that took place over the next four years, and then graduated in the Spring of 1987.

My original thought was to call the series Shermer High, since that's what ties all of these movies and characters together. But imagining it as an actual TV series, I decided that Shermer High doesn't have enough name recognition. It's better marketing to name it after one of Hughes' films.

I eliminated The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller for being too specific about a particular group of characters. Weird Science gives the wrong impression about what the series is. And Sixteen Candles is too specific to one year of the student's life; it won't work for all four years. That left Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, which are both broad enough to work. And I chose Pretty in Pink as being the more iconic of the two. In a minute, I'll get to how that affects the show. I don't want the name to be meaningless.

As I hinted above, it would be a four-season TV series chronicling the high school journey of a group of characters. Those who start the series as freshmen will graduate in the final season. I love the idea of limiting it that way, which is what Felicity did with the college career of its main character. That way, we don't have a bunch of characters hanging around their high school long after they should have graduated. If the show became super popular, the broadness of the title would let us follow the main character to college, but my idea is to end it after four seasons.

If this existed, I think that network TV would be the best place for it, as opposed to cable or streaming. It feels like the kind of thing the CW might air. Having it on network TV means that its seasons would start just as school is starting for the year, with a break at Christmas, and then ending the season just as school is getting out for summer vacation.

We'd have to do 20+ episodes a season that way, but our cast is going to be big enough that there's plenty of drama to make that work without feeling like we're spinning wheels or doing filler episodes.

It's also important to me that the show be set in the '80s and feature a lot of music from that time period, especially New Wave and Alternative. Music was super important to John Hughes and all six of these soundtracks are good. But the Pretty in Pink soundtrack was especially important to me. It let me know that I wasn't the only person listening to The Psychedelic Furs and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, while also introducing me to The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen. That music needs to be a big part of this show.

Since we're calling it Pretty in Pink, the main character has to be Andie Walsh, who was played by Molly Ringwald in the movie. And that's great. Andie's one of my favorite characters in any John Hughes movie. She's smart, talented, conflicted, and has a lot of drama not just at school, but also in her home life and with her best friend. She's a great person to build the show around.

Casting her is easy, too. It can only be Sophia Lillis, who was in the recent couple of It movies as well as last year's Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and this year's Gretel and Hansel.

That's plenty long for this post, so in the next post I'll talk about the various locations where characters will hang out, as well as the main adult cast members who'll be with the show all four years.

7 Days in May | Some Kind of Hughesiful

Pretty in Pink (1986)



This year is the 30th anniversary of The Breakfast Club, so we went to a special screening at a local theater. It got us interested in John Hughes again and talking about later movies that were inspired by his work. Which got me wanting to watch them again.

I always forget that Pretty in Pink wasn't directed by Hughes, but it was written by him. For whatever it's worth, he's also an executive producer on it, but it's the writing that makes it a Hughes film. I was shortly out of high school when it came out and totally related to the characters. Not so much the rich/poor caste system they experience, but the obstacles they encounter in their quests for love and the frustrations they have in trying to overcome them. For Andie (Molly Ringwald) and Blane (Andrew McCarthy), it's peer pressure as represented mostly by Steff (James Spader). As much as I like Duckie Dale (John Cryer), Steff is his closest competition for my favorite character in the movie. There is no douchier character in fiction, but the combination of Hughes' writing and Spader's performance elevates Steff above a villainous stereotype and makes him a believable, but tragic character with understandable, if reprehensible motivations.

As for Duckie, his obstacle to love is the simple fact that Andie doesn't feel the same way he does. Sadly, as a teenager I most related to him, but I was also encouraged by the way he's more or less honest with Andie about his feelings. He uses humor to make them seem less intense than they are, but I wasn't even that brave as a kid. There's a reason that OMD's "Secret" was an especially resonant song for me back in the day.

Which leads me to the music. I was very much a New Wave kid, but before Pretty in Pink, my access to that genre was limited by what made it onto our town's Top 40 station. The Pretty in Pink soundtrack introduced me to The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, and other bands that I'd missed, leading me down numerous musical rabbit holes that I'm forever grateful for.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)



I wanted to also rewatch Some Kind of Wonderful, which is essentially a gender-swapped remake of Pretty in Pink with the ending "fixed," but I'd loaned out my copy and didn't get it back in time. Instead, we watched a couple of later movies that are very much in the John Hughes wheelhouse. Meaning that they're funny, touching, and insightful looks at what high school is like.

First up was 10 Things I Hate About You, the adaptation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew that launched Heath Ledger's career and should have done the same for Julia Stiles. Why isn't she in more stuff? Anyway, since the movie's following Shakespeare's plot and not conventional romantic comedy tropes, it's wonderfully convoluted (without being confusing) and doesn't follow the typical romcom structure. Yes, there's a point at which an obstacle is thrown in the way of young love, and yes, it has to do with a deception perpetrated by one of the leads early in the relationship, but the obstacle comes up very late in the story and isn't resolved at all in the usual way.

Instead of the deceiver - in this case, Ledger's character - having to make a grand gesture to atone for the mistake, the situation is pretty easily resolved by the fact that Stiles' character is obviously in love with him, which makes her prone to forgiveness. She's also smart enough to understand why he did what he did before he really knew her and how that doesn't necessarily mean he'll keep doing it. After all, she gets the whole idea of behaving badly as a form of self-protection.

That's what I love so much about this movie. Both characters have self-protected themselves right out of society and it's beautiful seeing them slowly lower their defenses with each other. Unlike most romantic comedies where we're asked to root for the couple simply because they're likable and cute, 10 Things I Hate About You builds sympathy for its leads by making them angry, painful messes whom we want to see find acceptance and companionship in each other.

Easy A (2010)



Watching Easy A shortly after 10 Things, I realized what it is that I still like about a great teen comedy all these many years since I graduated. Loneliness and feeling like an outsider isn't something you completely grow out of. I have a ridiculously happy family life, but even then I'm occasionally susceptible to feeling a bit on my own. It's just human nature. And even when I don't personally feel that way, I'm sympathetic to those who do. So stories about loneliness and the experience of being an outsider are powerful. And high school is a perfect setting for those kinds of stories, where those themes can present themselves at almost cartoonish levels without feeling implausible.

10 Things I Hate About You is about a pair of self-imposed outsiders who find acceptance in each other without compromising themselves. Easy A is about a girl who doesn't want to be an outsider, thinks she's found a quick route into the group, but ends up even more ostracized than before. She has to figure out what she's going to do about that and in the end reaches the same conclusion that the 10 Things leads do. She says "screw it" to trying to fight her way into a group of people who don't want her and instead finds acceptance in someone else who's made the same decision. Way easier to do in the movies than in real life, but it's still a powerful and important message.