Entertainment
New Teacher, Same Bad Behavior
All we can do is hope for the success of the next addition to the list of movie-turned-TV-show adaptations: CBS' Bad Teacher , based on the Cameron Diaz comedy. If there's one thing we can learn from Hollywood, it's that adapting a movie into a TV series can be very tricky. On the one hand you can have a great commercial smash like M*A*S*H or you can end up with that Ferris Bueller mess of a TV show.
The subject material for CBS' new series is the 2011 film starring Cameron Diaz, which was a raunch-fest that followed a gold digger who loses out on trophy-wife status and goes back to teaching full-time at a local public school while not-so-secretly looking for another rich victim to marry. But is the TV version a carbon copy of the original?
CBS' series doesn't stray too far from that basic idea but it does change quite a few details around it. In the show, Diaz' character has been renamed to Meredith Davis and is played by actress Ari Graynor (For a Good Time Call). Meredith is still a gold digger but she's been divorced and is now broke due to a pretty fantastic pre-nup. She then decides to fake a resume and applies for a job at a middle school, somewhere she definitely has no business being. Here the series shows us the character we know and will hopefully come to love, the money-hungry, morals-lacking narcissist.
All of the other main characters from film are in the show as well, the geeky best friend of Meredith, the know-it-all rival teacher, the clueless principal and the gym teacher/potential future love interest. Though in this case, the gym teacher is a tad hotter than the film's (played by Jason Segel) because CBS' gym teacher takes the form of Veronica Mars' blonde surfer dude Ryan Hansen.
While the show will definitely be cleaner than its predecessor (it is television after all), it seems likely we will see Meredith in some very compromising positions, and if the character is as we remember from the 2011 film, she'll probably enjoy every minute of it.
