Clone High’s writers explain what happened to Gandhi and their ‘trickiest’ episode yet

Do you think a 2003 time traveler could hack it in today’s world? That’s the question the premiere of Clone high‘s much-anticipated second season (and, by extension, the revival of the show itself): Here’s a show that hasn’t been around for 20 years, about clones of high school historical figures all together who’ve all been literally frozen since their winter prom two decades ago . It’s the kind of thing that makes people fall behind the times (if you can believe it). The world looks completely different, and the first episode, “Let’s Try This Again,” takes that head-on and goes straight into the contrast of the show’s tone, then and now.

Turns out even nice guy Abe Lincoln (Will Forte) isn’t such a nice guy by 2023 standards. As he heads to the school’s field day, he conjures up a slew of 2003 slang that isn’t “politically correct” (as Abe puts it) and has been “retired” (as Christopher Columbus’s newly made clone, “Topher Bus’, interrupts to avoid a dated, offensive slur from Abe).

As co-showrunner Erica Rivinoja points out, this wasn’t just an exercise for the clone kids. It’s part of what made the second-season premiere the “trickiest episode” of it Clone high until now: balancing not only the exposition for new and old fans, but also the time that has passed.

“To come back 20 years later and address it — we also wanted to talk a little bit about what it’s like to look back at your work 20 years ago. And then, you know – what would you do better, 20 years later? Rivinoya says. “So that was really important to us, to put our characters through that learning experience, Oh wow. What I always said was not right. And so it was a tough episode to do because it was just a lot; there was a lot of emotion and story baked into it that we wanted to get out.

Image: WarnerMedia

Part of that was saying goodbye (or at least the cutaway-gag version of goodbye) to Gandhi’s character, who isn’t returning to the show after his 2003 portrayal. led to the show’s actual cancellation.

“You’re pretty stupid if your show gets canceled because of something and then you do it again,” Rivinoja notes. “So we don’t want to do that. But we wanted to say: ‘We hear you.’”

After getting that squared away, Rivinoja says to Polygon, “[It felt like] now we can just have fun with this.” Something that the writers felt they had so much more freedom now than when the show came out in the early 2000s. Back then, teen shows were much less like the wild antics of River valley or the grounded drama of Never have I everand much more like James Van Der Beek crying.

“It was originally like that Dawson’s Creek And 90210‘ says Rivinoja of the teen show influences for the 2003 show. ‘But now there are so many that it just felt [like] this genre has opened up and there is even more opportunity for parody and exploring those things, and especially those dystopian ones like Hunger Games, Divergent. […] it just felt like there was more to really tap into that.

Abe Lincoln (Will Forte) cries in the foreground while JFK (Chris Miller) and Joan (Nicole Sullivan) kiss in the background

Image: WarnerMedia

And so over the course of the show’s highly anticipated second season, Clone high goes for everything: spring break and sex edition; a musical based on the game Twister; plagued in midterms by a monster named Heebie Jeebie. While the tone was free to loosen up in its teen tropes, the goal was always not to lose the original show’s soapiness, always making sure that each episode was still “a very special episode of Clone high.” That’s pretty easy, according to co-showrunner Erik Durbin, as long as the clones remained largely the same: taking themselves very seriously and leaning into their feelings.

“Those shows back then were kind of teenagers who were in their feelings and could express themselves that way. [which] was something new. So [in the original] it’s like, Okay, you could just do that,Durbin tells Polygon. “Now you have to add so many layers, because […] the idea of ​​being into feelings and stuff, everybody’s vocabulary for it at a young age just exploded; it’s off the charts now.

“I think that’s generally good for this show. Because it’s so much more of a mainstream kind of thing, it’s better understood. And I think that’s a testament to why you can go out and make it in space, like in the dystopian world, or whatever. You can build the genre, because it’s such a part of the vocabulary for anyone who is like that now.

The first two episodes of Clone high Season 2 is now streaming on Max. From June 1, two new episodes will appear every Thursday.