Netflix find a hit with Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later

Wet Hot American Summer: 10 Years Later is funnier than almost anything on TV. Photo / supplied

It was 2001 when Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks and about a million other soon-to-be-famous comic actors nobody had then heard of starred in a bad movie called Wet Hot American Summer.

The movie was about the high jinks of a group of teenagers on the last day of an American summer camp in 1981 and it probably would have sunk, never to be heard of again, had it not then been adopted and beloved by a generation or two of presumably deeply stoned American college students presumably high on nostalgia for their own summer camp years.

That adoption, combined with the growing famousness of the movie's cast meant it had enough commercial appeal 14 years later to generate a television series, in the form of a prequel, featuring the same movie characters.

The TV series still wouldn't have happened, however, had it not been for the emergence of Netflix. It's hard to imagine any other self-respecting broadcaster agreeing to take a risk on a series based on such a bad film, especially given that the cast had become exponentially more expensive in the interim. But, having taken that risk, Netflix found themselves with a 2015 hit.

Adam Scott in Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later. Photo / Netflix

After the incoherent shambles of the movie, the series was unexpectedly brilliant, funny and endearing, enchanting even, with its string of wacky premises and its fond skewering of conventional summer camp movie tropes, performed with sheer genius by an extremely accomplished cast of 40+-year-old actors playing 16-year-old children.

Next Friday, Netflix will release a second series, called Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later, about a 1991 reunion of the attendees from the original camp.

The characters in the new series, set in the sad and whiny era that was the early 90s, have settled into the career and domestic mundanity and general listlessness that characterises a person's mid-20s. As a result, it's lost some of the joy and hopefulness of the new love and sex at the centre of the teenage lives in the first series, but it's still funnier than almost anything on TV, and so far ahead of the movie as to be almost unrecognisable.

There are many ways to make a bad movie, but a good one is to follow a formula that's worked before, hitting the right beat on the right page of your screenplay, and using relatable characters who attract positive feedback from test audiences. Another way is by creating something that makes little narrative sense, that pushes at the edges of what might be called funny, that includes as one of its core cast a talking can of vegetables.

You can assume the worst of the audience or you can challenge them to meet your fruity vision. It may not quite work, but by trying, you open up new and possibly fertile ground, and you find yourself, 14 years later, having figured some things out, making a TV series so good that next time you'll only have to wait two years before you get paid to do it all over again.

Lowdown:

What: Wet Hot American Summer 10 Years Later
When & Where: Friday August 4 on Netflix