Netflix's Ace 'Heartbreak High' Revival Will Return for Season Two in 2024

School will be back in session sometime next year, including with two new cast members.
Sarah Ward
Published on July 07, 2023

In 2022, Netflix asked a question: what happens when you take the Australian teen series of the 90s and update it to the 2020s, all while riding a huge wave of nostalgia for all things stemming from three decades back? The answer seemed obvious on paper, but there were no guarantees about the new Heartbreak High revival until it actually arrived. The answer, thankfully, was a worthy successor to the beloved 1994–99 hit that every 90s Aussie kid watched.

No one said "rack off" to the Sydney-set show's latest run, clearly, or to its new batch of Hartley High teens, or their fresh dose of messy teen lives. Not Aussie audiences, with the series making Netflix's top ten TV shows in the country for the five weeks after its September 2022 release. And, not the streaming service itself, given that it promptly renewed the show for season two.

That was last year's news — and, if you've been hanging out for Heartbreak High's return, Netflix has just started confirming season two details. Firstly, you'll be waiting until 2024 for school to be in session again. Secondly, there'll be a couple of new students.

Sam Rechner (The Fabelmans) will play country boy and classic cinema fan Rowan Callaghan, and he's destined for a love triangle. Also, Kartanya Maynard (Deadloch) joins the Hartley crew as Zoe Clarke, who has big thoughts on celibacy — she's in favour — as part of a gang of Puriteens.

On the returning crew, character-wise: Amerie (Ayesha Madon, The Moth Effect), Harper (Asher Yasbincek, How to Please a Woman), Darren (screen first-timer James Majoos), Quinni (Chloe Hayden, Jeremy the Dud), Dusty (Josh Heuston, Thor: Love and Thunder), Ca$h (Will McDonald, Home and Away), Malakai (Thomas Weatherall, Troppo), Spider (Bryn Chapman Parish, Mr Inbetween), Ant (debutant Brodie Townsend), Sasha (Gemma Chua-Tran, Mustangs FC) and Missy (fellow newcomer Sherry-Lee Watson).

Season one started with Amerie becoming a pariah at Hartley after a big revelation — an "incest map" plotting out who's hooked up with who throughout the school — and also struggling with a sudden rift in her friendship with bestie Harper. Attempting to repair her reputation, she called on help from her new pals Quinni and Darren, all while working through her crush on Dusty and developing feelings for Malakai. And that's just the start of the Heartbreak High revival's season one story.

In season two, everyone will back for a second term after doing some growing up over the holidays, and Hartley is now the lowest-ranking school in the district. Netflix is teasing that threesomes, chlamydia and burning cars will be distant memory for the gang — but there'll still be teen chaos, of course, or this wouldn't be Heartbreak High.

It was back in 2020 that Netflix initially announced that it was bringing the series back — and yes, it sure is a 2020s-era take on the Aussie classic, including everything from friendship fights, yelling about vaginas from the top of a building and throwing dildos at walls through to consent, crime, drugs and police brutality.

The original Heartbreak High was a massive deal, and was filled with now-familiar faces, including Alex Dimitriades, a pre-Home and Away Ada Nicodemou, and Avengers: Endgame and Mystery Road's Callan Mulvey as Drazic. It painted a multicultural picture of Australia that was unlike anything else on TV at the time. And, for its six-year run across two Aussie networks, the Sydney-shot show was must-see television — not bad for a series that started as a spinoff to the Claudia Karvan and Alex Dimitriades-starring 1993 movie The Heartbreak Kid, too.

Check out the trailer for the Heartbreak High revival's first season below:

Heartbreak High season two will arrive sometime in 2024 — we'll update you with an exact date is announced. The show's first season is available to stream now via Netflix. Read our full review.

Published on July 07, 2023 by Sarah Ward
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