“Heartbreak High” will be back for Season 2, Netflix has announced.
The re-imagined show was created by Hannah Carroll Chapman and produced by Fremantle Australia and NewBe, with Season 1 hitting the platform in September.
Since then, it has remained in the top 10 TV shows on Netflix in Australia. It also spent three weeks in the global top 10, peaking at No. 5 and amassing over 42.6 million viewing hours in three weeks.
The show is billed as “an all-new Australian drama inspired by the original ’90s series, but totally reimagined for a new generation”.
The original ran for seven seasons and was broadcast in over 70 countries including the U.K., U.S., Germany, Argentina, Mexico, India and Indonesia.
Hannah Carroll Chapman, the creator of the new iteration of the show, said she was inspired by the original series, but the new version had since taken on a life of its own.
“I was so obsessed with “Heartbreak High”… It’s iconic. The characters were so memorable… And it was so Australian. It was so particularly Australian – of us,” she said earlier this year at the Screen Forever conference.
“I think part of the thing that we thought a lot about in terms of the original, was that it was chaotic and also hopeful and something – it was a world in which you wanted as a young person to live in. And we wanted to capture the essence of that.
“I think when we first started putting it together, we wanted a huge amount of legacy characters and I think we’ve moved a bit away from that. I mean there still are, but we also, in talking to Netflix and Fremantle, we wanted this to be its own show that belonged to teens, that wasn’t just this show that exists for old-school fans.
“So I’m hoping that there’s a nice balance there, that people who love the original show feel the essence of that show and have these nice Easter eggs popping up, but that it’s very much for a younger generation.”
