Monday, February 22, 2010

10 Things I Hate About You: The Television Series

“Pilot.” By Carter Covington. Perf. Lindsey Shaw, Meaghan Jette Martin, Ethan Peck, Nicholas Braun, Cameron James, Dana Davis, Jolene Purdy, and Larry Miller. Dir. Gil Junger. 10 Things I Hate About You. Season 1, episode 1. ABC Family. 7 July 2009. DVD. ABC Studios, 2010. Hulu. Web. 22 February 2010.

I don't have too much to say on the television series version of 10 Things I Hate About You. In each remake, the distance from Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew grows greater and greater and the allusions to Shakespeare grow fewer and fewer. In the film, occasional Shakespeare sonnets and Elizabethan garb shore up the Shakespeare side. In the first season of the television series, I noticed only one direct allusion to Shakespeare. Bianca tells her older sister that she intends to "befriend and beguile" the most popular girl in school. Kat replies with this line:
"Beguile? Big word, Shakespeare!"
The rest of the series is a fairly-light riff on the film—which it, itself, a fairly-rough derivative of Shakespeare's play. Still, the series is a nice, light comedy freely available (as of this date, at least) to view on Hulu! Enjoy!



Links: The Film at IMDB.
Click below to purchase the television series from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

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