Bad and badder: from film to TV

Ari Graynor in Bad Teacher.

Bad Teacher is no better the second time.

Remember much about the 2011 movie comedy Bad Teacher, starring Cameron Diaz as the title character? Nah, me neither. I do recall she habitually smoked pot and got drunk at school, swore at her students and played movies during class so she could sleep. And her life's goal was landing a rich husband, which she believed she needed breast augmentation to achieve, so an absurd amount of the movie was devoted to her schemes to raise money for said surgery. Besides that, all I can recollect is it wasn't very funny, despite the hard work of Diaz and co-stars Justin Timberlake and Jason Segel.

Now it has been turned into a TV show, which isn't an intrinsically terrible idea - if you're adapting a story from one medium to another, it's generally best to pick a property that wasn't very good to begin with.

There are exceptions, of course - I was appalled at news the brilliant Coen brothers' film Fargo was being used as the basis for a television series, and look how that turned out.
Anyway, I watched the first episode of Bad Teacher with low expectations but an open mind. Suffice to say my expectations were met and I give it a grade of "meh".

The basic set-up from the movie is more or less retained, with Diaz's gold-digging teacher played by Ari Graynor, whom you may remember from The Sopranos. I don't. In this version, though, she has faked her teaching qualification because she thinks high school is the best place to meet rich single dads.

In the movie, Diaz was a bona fide teacher who really didn't give a toss, and she set her sights on the substitute teacher played by Timberlake.

The show sports a theoretically strong cast, including Sex and the City's Kristin Davis and Roseanne's Sara Gilbert, but they're wasted on a script that - problematically for a comedy - isn't especially amusing.

Worse, by the end of the first episode it has already been intimated Graynor's character might have the capacity to care for her students, even if she denies it, so you can add sentimentality to the show's sins.

Turns out the show's US network only made seven episodes before flunking it, so if you do decide to watch Bad Teacher - and I don't advise it - you're in for a short semester before school's out forever.

With the title The Truth About Personality, I thought the latest doco from Michael Mosley (The Truth About Exercise, the Fast Diet), would be focused on categorising different personalities, which made me idly wonder what the Bad Teacher character would be: some stripe of narcissistic, surely?

But it's not about that at all. Instead, like some of his previous shows, this features Mosley self-diagnosing an affliction (in this case it's that he is a pessimist) and then setting out to find a cure - he literally wants to change his mind and become a happier person.

The beauty of this approach is it utterly personalises the subject, humanising the various positive psychology theories and techniques under discussion and providing the programme with a well-defined purpose. Thanks to its hopeful conclusion, I thoroughly recommend it to all my fellow glass-half-empty types.

Bad Teacher premieres Monday, 8pm on Four; The Truth about Personality screens Wednesday, 8.30pm, on the Knowledge Channel.