Watching at midnight won’t make Wuthering High School, the latest adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, as dark as desired.  Crashing waves beneath the bright blue sky of Malibu?  The Rich & Bratty in rags more pricey than cars?  Barbies & Kens moping around homes built like resorts with cool stone pools, how could it?  But that’s the point, right?  Choosing the cold and dreary Upper East Coast for a setting would have been apropos, but redundant.

Still, because anything and everything Wuthering Heights is irresistible to those insanely obsessed with the novel, we nibbled our nails and watched.  Because when Lifetime bounces your baby on its knee, while its tempting to look the other way, look you must.  For, as one critic reminds us, while “[Wuthering Heights] seems like hard material to ruin, even for a network known for clumsy, sexist takes on potential-rich stories,” ruin they can.

And sort of did.

All the elements for a throat-tightening, Kleenex-pulling ride on the waves of emotion presented themselves:

• Finding Cathy Earnshaw (Paloma Kwiatkowski) flat on her back in grief over her mother’s suicide.
• Cathy, wandering like a ghost through the hollows of her family’s cavernous mansion.
• Cathy, the victim of slut-shaming in broad daylight.
• Heath (Andrew Jacobs), a different shade of black under a head of black-as-night hair fit for a shampoo ad, witnessing the US government truck away an entire family of illegal immigrants–his own–deported (albeit in style) across the border.
• Heath watching with those dark eyes Eddie, Cathy’s natural equal, encroach on their doomed love.

These cold hard facts alone should have been enough to knot the throat, to draw the fingers rushing toward the Kleenex.  But, no.

Cathy is angry and brooding, withdrawn.  Brother Lee (Sean Flynn) is angry, brooding, and using.  And, well, Eddie Linton (Matthew Boehm) is mostly just icily annoyed with Heath, his nemesis and competitor for Cathy’s affection.  Then, in walks Ellen; having drank from the fountain of youth, she makes a comeback as Clint Eastwood’s daughter, young, golden blonde, and, yes, as nosy and meddling as the original.  But what’s cooler than that, right?

All of these wonderfully chic details shining in the sun of California should have lit a fire.  Thankfully, it did not.  Or, these morose marionettes, gliding over floors of shiny marble, would have burnt up–like the unfeeling logs of wood they embodied, found in their fancy, clean-swept fireplaces.

I left the warmth of my bed.  I took futile kitchen breaks.  Snack-less and empty, I returned.  I dozed during commercials.  I had fallen asleep one final time when suddenly I blinked and saw Heath snuggling up to Cathy in a wooden box where undoubtedly the two unlit matches belonged.

“The sweeping black moods and wind over the moors and the poker-hot passion felt in lips and slaps across the face of the gloriously wild original were missing.  Missing!  That passion was as lost as I was . . . watching that cold too-blue sky and that cold white sun over those too cool kids.” 

Abbreviated and choppy, Wuthering High School, like a bad romance, lacked authentic sensation, the ability to touch, the grip craved.  Although I rode with it till it died, it was hardly haunting.  As a result, emotionally, I could not get mine.  And I wanted it.  Bad.

Wuthering High School withers in the cool of the California sun.

***

Try this one!  However cold, sterile, and dystopian, Wuthering Heights On a Drip delivers the stuff!