Scandals are just people forgetting their manners.

Allow me to begin this with: I'm going to try really REALLY hard to not compare the show to the movie, but this moment is forever embedded in my memory as one of the most romantic things a guy can ever do:

So you must all understand the heart wrenching fear I had when I gave in and watched the first three episodes of the series (and episode seven, its all Hulu had).

The sisters, Kat and Bianca (Lindsay Shaw and Meaghan Jette Martin) are serviceable, and they managed to get the father from the movie back for the show. Bianca is a shallow popularity seeking princess, Kat is her bitchy direct more artistic sister. Par for the course.  Their dad is unreasonable, although sometimes wise, and seems to really love his daughters, which, I guess is a start.

The guy who plays Cameron (Nicholas Braun) is wooden, and his make up guy needs to be hit. He seems to just walk around perplexed and unable to actually do anything. He swoons over Bianca, he learns French, and you sort of start to sympathize with him. But in an attempt to give him some humor, I guess, the writers see fit to have him do totally stupid things, like give him a weak stomach, so he almost throws up from sitting alone in a not moving car. A character who should be important to the plot, and someone you cheer for, is slowly being reduced to a bath room joke, and that, my friends, is a shame. He seems to have read about loving someone in books, and not ever experienced it himself.

Patrick Verona seems to be an expert on walking through a scene, looking at something and then doing nothing. The actor lacks any rough edges, and so therefore the rumors of him having eaten human flesh seem not only out of place, but forced. His features are more chiseled than the faces of the popular boy, and his strut more pronounced. The actor hasn’t been given much of a chance to act through (I caught the most recent episode, where it seems like he’s been given some lines at long last, good, I was getting bored of him having a few things to say and then going away). Ethan Peck is handling his non-acting role well, although I sort of wish he had a little more personality.

There is also a complete lack of chemistry in ANY of the projected couples on this tv show. Kat and Patrick start having it every now and then, but its not enough to carry a romantic relationship, Cameron/Bianca lacks anything on ether side.

Chastity might be the saving grace of the show.  Dana Davis has so thrown herself into being this total bitch that I can almost forgive the rest of the show. Almost.

In essence ABC family has stripped everything which made the movie great and turned it into a pretty vanilla TV show, with a kickin’ sound track. The base in Taming of the Shrew seems to have fallen by the way side in lieu of making it into a watered down tv version of the sort of shows which once littered the WB.

I feel like had they changed the names and the title and didn’t bring me in hoping for 10 Things I Hate About You I might see this show as mindless fluff. Unfortunately they didn’t, and I’m stuck wishing and hoping that they might, one day, catch up to their lofty predecessor. But for the time being, do yourself a favor, watch Greek for your hot guy/comedy fix, and leave this travesty alone.