The 2020 TV series John Cusack was desperate to see fail: “It’ll suck”
Zoë Kravitz is undeniably and effortlessly cool.
She could dress herself in a bin bag and somehow make it look like a nonchalant fashion statement, and it’s in fact for all of these reasons that she was absolutely the worst person to cast in the TV adaptation of High Fidelity.
I’ve read the book enough times to know that its protagonist, Rob, is a complete and utter asshole. He’s a manic music fan who thinks that the rest of the world processes their surroundings like he does, through the lens of every classic album.
Emotions are records, and people are characters, and he’s not high and mighty for observing the world that way, but more self-righteous and constantly looking to victimise himself. Oddly, there is a part of him that most neurotic music fans could identify with, including myself.
John Cusack was the perfect person to cast for the initial film adaptation. Despite picking the story up and moving it stateside, it still managed to capture the complex essence of the book. One where, despite all better judgment, you root for the underdog characters in their misguided and at times, misogynistic romantic endeavours.
On both the page and screen, the story was a roaring success, and so it became a predictable source of adaptation come the television renaissance. Rather than writing a new story for the small screen, execs rehashed it and sought to cash in on the episodic boom that was taking place. In fairness, High Fidelity, with its very distinctive chapters, was actually the perfect story for it; however, the lead actor was not.
Kravitz was called in to portray an adapted version of Rob. Going by Robyn, Kravitz’s character had none of the loathsome qualities of Nick Hornby’s original. She was the considerate record shop owner who had graduated from fan to curator, and thus, she wasn’t positioned as the social outsider she should have been. There was a level of aspiration to Robyn, despite all of her fundamentally crap behaviour, that felt like it entirely missed the book’s subtle point of critiquing Rob for his otherwise questionable decisions.
Hulu cancelled the show after just one season, despite Kravitz’s protests, and the project never really had a chance to gain the cult and critical acclaim of the original book and movie. Either way, its failure was one that needed to be considered with nuance: was the story right for the modern audience? Was the focus placed too much on the music rather than the relationships? Did it even belong on television in the first place? Well, the original onscreen Rob, Cusack himself, weighed in with an answer that had none of that.
He took to social media to write, “The woman part seems good / the rest not so much, but it’s Nick’s book, hope at least he’s involved; if he’s not, it’ll suck”.
Hornby was, in fact, involved, serving as an executive producer on the Hulu series and became one of its most vocal supporters, particularly for the hiring of Kravitz. But despite all of the right cultural recipes, it just did not land.
