November is flattening morale, Twitter is burning with toxicity and I saw a living mouse in my living room, anyway, it takes several episodes of Completely high school to get our spirits up to nine – or just get it back to seven, we’d be fine with that.
First deployed as a web series in December 2021, the comedy Completely high school gets the big traditional TV treatment with full 30-minute episodes and a dramatic curve worthy of a traditional sitcom. The Crave platform offers this Wednesday the first two half-hours and by December 14, the ten episodes of this parody of Scott Brothers will be there.
On so-called regular airwaves, the Noovo channel will relay Completely high school Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. starting January 11. Between two sheets unfortunately no longer lasts the year.
So, Completely high school, it’s totally stupid, super nono, but very funny. The concept ? The series pastiche American teen series like The OC set in a high school where there is a) a beloved football team, b) evil cheerleaders, c) a bunch of dopey athletes, d) a gay student in the closet, e) a delinquent at heart sweetheart who grew up on the wrong side of the train tracks and f) a hyper-motivated class president hated by the school coolies.
The episodes of Completely high school shoot in English and the actors then dub each other in international French to imitate the bad translations à la Dawson and Degrassi. Expressions like “girl thing”, “it sucks”, “I like it” or “virgin’s face” pepper the dialogues, of course. And it’s really funny.
The action started in 2007 – hello wicks headbands and Fubu linen – at the New Garden Hills Valley School in Chicago, Wisconsin, Nevada. It’s back to school for Allie Thompson (Rosalie Vaillancourt) and her nemesis Ashley Winterbottom (Katherine Levac), the rich high school chick whose father, Reverend Winterbottom, offers gay conversion therapy.
Ashley is (still) dating star basketball player Brian Manson (Pierre-Yves Roy-Desmarais), but their relationship will crumble with the arrival of the dark Chaz (Pierre-Luc Lafontaine), the new student of New Garden Hills Valley, an orphan with a troubled past who was raised in the grimy part of town.
The plot of Completely high school feeds mainly on clichés of adolescent drama, the good old “teen drama”, and stereotypes attached to the main characters. The enthusiastic Keith O’Keefe (Patrick Emmanuel Abellard) tries to reveal his sexual orientation to his parents and he erects a barrier between him and the villainous Ryder Williams (Antoine Pilon), also homosexual, but less preppy.
New episodes explore New Garden Hills Valley’s C-wing, home to outcasts like goth Quinn Gray (Nahéma Ricci), who wears a spiked necklace and reads the book. self harm for dummies. The New Professor Brown (Eric Bernier), a caricature of Robin Williams in The Society of Dead Poetswill not hesitate to climb on his desk and quote the rapper 50 Centimes to motivate his flock.
The second episode contains two major cameos, the singer Émile Bilodeau and Julie Snyder who embodies an overly made-up shower-baguette mother. Jay Du Temple shows up at the eighth half hour as the famous rapper Jeminem. And Guillaume Lambert plays a regular in the dubious therapies of the Reverend Winterbottom, where he will meet our poor Keith, who is pronounced Kiss, in the French way, like Will Smisse.
No need to have watched the web series Completely high school to embark on its enhanced version. On the other hand, you have to be careful since the sitcom’s schoolboy humor, sometimes coarse and fast, is distributed on several levels: the lyrics, the facial expressions, the theme song, the graffiti on the walls, the billboards and the video description .
At a time when 20-somethings are recycling Y2K fashion (the 2000s), fans of Completely high school will enjoy this very Hilary Duff universe, flip phones, conversations on MSN, Chad Michael Murray, butterfly barrettes and Not yet a teen movie.
If you know Rachael Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze Jr. ofShe has it allyou will surely decode all the hidden references – but not so many – of Completely high school. Leave here a song by Gavin DeGraw, Paula Cole or Sixpence None the Richer. Yolo and LOL, the gang.