MTV is making new episodes of Clone High with original creators Phil Lord and Chris Miller
When Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse counted the existence of a Clone High movie among its many Easter eggs, we embraced it as a wistful ode to what could have been had MTV not axed the cult series in 2003. We were wrong.
While Clone High isn’t getting a movie, it is getting new episodes with original creators Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Bill Lawrence working to “reimagine” it. Per a press release, Erica Rivinoja, previously of The Last Man On Earth, will serve as showrunner and pen the pilot episode alongside Lord and Miller.
It’s unclear how many episodes MTV is ordering, or when it might air. But the “updated version” of the series will continue to count Abraham Lincoln, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and John F. Kennedy among its student body of cloned, horny historical figures.
It’s a big get for MTV, what with Lord and Miller having become major forces in Hollywood due to their work on the Lego movies and Into The Spider-Verse. But it’s also not entirely surprising. In a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lawrence, the Scrubs creator who also worked on Clone High, said the show is the one “we most often think about revisiting.”
“What’s always amazing to me is, I created a bunch of TV shows,” he said. “There’s a lot of good Scrubs fans on the internet, but I would tell you it’s amazing to me that neck-and-neck with them are the people who are psychotically passionate about Clone High, even though it was only on for 13 episodes. It always drives me insane. Phil and Chris think it’s cool it survives this way, but I’m annoyed that if it started now, with streaming and YouTube and everything else, it had such a binge-worthy short-attention-span theater with great little clips that would live everywhere on social media, I think it would be a monster for those guys.”
It’s a good time to be the creator of a cult cartoon series. Just yesterday, Comedy Central announced that Mike Judge would be reimagining Beavis And Butt-Head for two new seasons and a host of spin-offs and specials.