Few movies are more firmly associated with the era in which they were made than Reality Bites, Ben Stiller’s ’90s romantic comedy about the ups and downs in the love lives of a trio of Generation Xers played by Stiller, Ethan Hawke, and Winona Ryder. It’s hard to imagine the film taking place at any other time, or capturing anything other than that ’90s sense of malaise.
But obviously someone at Peacock can, because they’ve ordered a Reality Bites series. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new show is a “reframing” of the original, but like the classic movie, “the Peacock take is centered on the driven, idealistic Lelaina Pierce and her three best friends as they leave college and try “adulting” in the 1990s. As the world around them is on the brink of a seismic shift, they struggle to hold onto who they are, and to each other.”
I mean, I guess reality bites now more than ever, so the title still works anyway. The writer of the original movie, Helen Childress, is attached to the Peacock series as writer.
Believe it or not, this is not the first time an attempt to make a Reality Bites TV series. Back in 2013, Ben Stiller himself was paired with Childress to write a script for their own take on a Reality Bites series for NBC. That version of the project never quite came together, though. Why? Who knows, but obviously the issues could probably be chalked up to the fact that reality … uh … line? Anyway, we’ll see if this version actually makes it to streaming.
Celebrities Who Couldn’t Convincingly Play Themselves Onscreen
The very famous people struggled to play fictional versions of themselves in movies. Apparently, that is not as easy to do as it looks.
