Spoilers ahead for the American TV remake of Heathers.

It should come as no surprise that the marathon release of Paramount Television’s Heathers fell apart. The embattled TV remake of the 1988 film comedy has been delayed repeatedly over the past year, as a wave of school shootings and terrible advance reviews made the show’s tongue-in-cheek look at high school violence seem like a public relations disaster. Paramount attempted to sell off the series, then heavily recut it, merging its 10 hourlong episodes into five two-hour segments, and removing large segments of the finale. But the plan for a weeklong Halloween marathon release of the recut edition, starting on October 25th, seemed to be coming together.

Then on October 27th, an anti-Semitic gunman killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. And on Monday the 29th, Paramount pulled two of the merged Heathers episodes from the middle of its release schedule, concerned that they would look inappropriate in the wake of still more American gun violence. It was the latest setback in a long, bumpy road for the series, but Heathers’ struggles weren’t just a collision of unfortunate current events with misguided nostalgia for edgy 1980s comedy. From the beginning, the show was an impressive collection of bad decisions and a misreading of the society that produced it.

As glib as it sounds, the world in which the original Winona Ryder and Christian Slater movie was released was genuinely different, and not just because there were far fewer mass shootings in the United States per year compared with the horrific current rate. Awareness and treatment of mental illness was far lower in 1988, and so was the bar for transgressive art on the subject. In the current #NeverAgain era, a comedy focusing on two high school kids whose response to bullies includes murder and a plan to blow up a school feels tasteless and insensitive, even before the casual homophobia and jokes around teen suicide.

The Heathers series was announced in March 2016, when it received a pilot order from TV Land, with plans to make it a half-hour comedy. In January 2017, the network ordered a full season as an hourlong dramedy, but two months after that, the series moved to sibling network Paramount Network without explanation. (It could simply be that Paramount, the reworked Spike Network, needed content. It’s also as likely that TV Land execs realized they didn’t want Heathers in their lineup.)

In January 2018, an initial trailer provoked vocal backlash. (More on that in a second.) More significantly, the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February prompted Paramount to postpone the series from its original March 2018 debut. Three months later, with Parkland still in the news, thanks to vocal student activists, Paramount dropped the show entirely for what were, by then, well-publicized concerns about the show’s lack of sensitivity.

Attempts to sell the completed series to another network were unsuccessful, although it did sell internationally. In early October, Paramount began promoting its re-edited version of the series, which removed an entire episode’s worth of material. And then the attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh prompted Paramount to skip broadcasting two of the edited episodes — essentially cutting four of the original, unedited episodes, skipping straight from episode four to the heavily edited final episode. (More on that in a second, too.) All nine episodes, as broadcast in the US, are available to stream at the Paramount Network site — at least as of this writing.

Beyond the fact that a revenge comedy set in an American high school would obviously play differently in a post-Columbine world — the original Heathers was released 11 years before Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people in the most infamous American school shooting prior to Parkland — the television series makes a variety of changes to the movie, almost all of which are troubling. What to make, for example, of the series’s original ending, in which the high school where the show is set is blown up, resulting in an afterlife sequence where the students killed in the explosion are happier than they were when they were alive? (Well, almost all — even in death, the main character, Veronica, can’t find peace or belonging, in spite of her egotistical best intentions.)

Only international audiences got to see that happen, though. For the US broadcast, the climactic scenes, and much of the rest of the final episode, was abandoned entirely, with the bombing left as a possible future. As far as American viewers know, the series ends with Veronica on her way to prom where a bomb may or may not go off, depending on whether her boyfriend and part-time psychopath J.D. can follow through on his attempt to redeem himself in the name of true love.

The most dramatic change the show made, however, is the decision to radically alter the lineup of the Heathers themselves. In the original movie, they’re a trio of shallow mean girls who represent everything about the dominant social elite: they’re white, straight, traditionally beautiful, heterosexual, elitist, exclusive, judgmental, and bullying. They dominate and terrorize everyone unlike them just because they can. The television reboot turns that dynamic around, with a new trio of Heathers: a snarky heavyset girl, a biracial girl, and a genderqueer student. Together, these previously marginalized types bully Veronica and J.D. — who, not coincidentally, are white, straight, traditionally beautiful, and heterosexual. Who could blame them for fighting back? They’re just standing their ground, right?

The obvious, creepy MAGA-ization of the concept significantly alters the story being told, and it was the primary reason the trailer for the show provoked such a dramatic response when it debuted. Critics protested that a story about outsiders finding their voice had been revised to suggest outsiders and marginalized kids have become a domineering force that needs to be stopped at any cost. Reviews for the finished season were no kinder, calling the show “a hateful, bigoted exercise in regression hiding behind the guise of dark comedy,” and complaining that it “managed to take the more problematic aspects of the concept and somehow make them ickier.”

A significant portion of the show’s tone-deafness may lie with the fact that showrunner Jason Micallef seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the original Heathers. Talking to Entertainment Weekly about criticism of the trailer in January, he said, “In the original film, the Heathers were the ones I always loved, and it’s the same with the series. The Heathers are the aspirational characters… The villain is J.D. — and that’s the same in the movie and same in our show.”

Not to defend J.D. — a psychopathic parody of a rebel-kid cliché, who is less charming in the television version — but the point of the original Heathers was that Veronica was surrounded by “villains,” and that the Heathers and J.D. were merely different flavors of narcissistic toxicity that failed to see anything outside of their own desires. The re-edited U.S. finale of the show makes that point somewhat accidentally when Veronica likens the Heathers to J.D. as self-consciously “cool kids” she’d rather not talk to.

Unfortunately, the now-missing climax backtracked this reading substantially. In the afterlife, two of the Heathers meet and happily ask each other, “Why were we so mean to each other down there?” “Maybe it’s because being mean was easier… than being brave,” comes the syrup-laden response. The message was clear. Bullies! They’re just socially awkward! They don’t mean to destroy lives; they were really just scared!

Heathers as a concept feels dissonant with the world we live in now — a world where the connection between bullying and teen suicide is much clearer, and dismissing bullying with a shrug and a gag seems disingenuous. But if anything, the TV version feels like it’s too much in tune with the present objectification and othering of anyone who isn’t white and straight. The attempts to normalize and explain away bullying are also of the moment, and so are the insincere attempts to pretend to care, which fall by the side when shock and cruelty are far easier to achieve. Looking at the world through the specific lens of 2018, the Heathers may, in fact, seem aspirational to a certain audience: they’re powerful and in control, and they’re confident they aren’t really bullies at heart, no matter how bullying their words or actions may be.

But the audience who might believe that tack isn’t the Heathers audience. Or, at least, not the original Heathers audience. For all its flippant attitude, deadly violence, and “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” outrageousness of the movie, it’s still about the need for kindness and acceptance and finding a moderate, human path between extreme, aggressive points of view. (Think of how the movie ends, with Veronica asking the first victim of the Heathers’ bullying to hang out.) If Micallef and his crew had paid attention to that lesson, then things might have gone very differently for their TV edition of Heathers. Flipping the original version’s script without understanding any of its messages was always going to be a problem. Bringing it into such a radically changed world was even worse. The show was doomed from the start.

Industry insiders were reportedly shocked about Disney’s sudden firing of Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn two weeks ago, in response to an orchestrated outcry over tasteless jokes he’d made on Twitter years earlier. But the most surprising thing was how quickly the entire story moved. The right-wing troll attacks on Gunn, who was in the process of pre-production on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, peaked late on Thursday the 19th; by mid-Friday the 20th, Disney had removed him, describing the tweets as “indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values.”

At San Diego Comic-Con, where Gunn’s scheduled appearance to promote a horror movie he produced for Sony was pulled at the last minute, the firing prompted executives to gossip about whether Disney had overreacted. (The consensus seemed to be yes.) They repeatedly came back to the same question: What is actually going on here?

Over the past year or so, the entertainment industry has become used to watching celebrities and other public figures being forced from their positions in large part due to pressure from social media. The escalation grew parallel to the #MeToo movement — initially, actors like Jeffrey Tambor and Kevin Spacey were forced to quit, fired from existing projects, or replaced during reshoots. Then, completed projects were shelved amid sexual abuse allegations, prompting much hand-wringing about ruined careers. All of this was primarily driven by social media discussion around the perpetrators’ alleged actions, spreading the word far and wide and making it impossible to avoid the accusations. The sexual abuses of the most infamous targets, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, were “open secrets” that went unpunished for decades — until the allegations went viral on social media.

The movement went beyond the entertainment industry, and beyond sexual harassment stories. Bill O’Reilly believes activists on social media got him ousted at Fox News. Similar protests against Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity met with varying degrees of success. Entire groups, like Sleeping Giants, exist to leverage social media into social pressure around a specific political agenda.

And Gunn is a victim of this particular social media leverage playbook. Gunn’s career assassination was clearly political. Alt-right figure and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, one of the main movers behind the manufactured outcry against Gunn and other left-leaning media figures, later tweeted a statement in which he helpfully clarified, “Republicans refuse to hold hearings into Hollywood casting couch practices. Democrats won’t stand up to Hollywood. It’s time for them to do this. Starting tomorrow we will be contacting members of Congress to demand they hold hearings into Hollywood casting couch and child grooming practices.” (He continued, in a separate tweet, “Hollywood gets major tax breaks. Congress has every right to find out if those breaks are deserved.”)

Gunn is a curious target, following Cernovich’s logic. He doesn’t really work with child actors, although the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are clearly aimed toward children to some degree. But he was an easy target; the jokes he tweeted between 2009 and 2012 were crass at best (“The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped it’s like, ‘Whew, this feels great, not being raped!’”), and it’s easy to take offense at them.

Never mind that he had previously addressed and apologized for similarly offensive comments before the release of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, writing, “It kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said…  I’m learning all the time. I promise to be more careful with my words in the future.” His tweets could be retrieved via internet archives, and could be used to make the point that Gunn has said particularly inappropriate things.

Gunn’s experience was not unique. It had a curious parallel to ABC’s firing of Roseanne Barr in May after she posted a racist tweet. Again, the action taken was decisive and fast — and, for that matter, taken by a Disney-owned company, which described the language used in the tweet at the center of the controversy as “inconsistent with our values.” If anything, ABC’s actions in response to Barr’s tweet were more dramatic than Marvel’s treatment of Gunn. He was simply fired from the studio, whereas ABC cancelled the Roseanne revival entirely, affecting many more people.

The two situations aren’t truly analogous. Gunn’s tweets were up to a decade in the past, while Barr’s tweet reflected her current thinking and displayed actual racism, as opposed to tasteless humor. Nonetheless, there is a lesson to be learned from similarities between the two, namely: If you want to keep your job, don’t tweet anything that could possibly be construed as controversial. In the case of both Barr and Gunn, their employers’ response was, essentially, “Shut This Down Immediately, Sort Out The Details Later,” with the emphasis on damage control over details. (The details were taken care of eventually; ABC later backtracked on canceling Roseanne, announcing the replacement series The Conners in late June, and similarly, there are now reports that Marvel might consider rehiring Gunn.)

Many people have already heeded this lesson, including Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, who deleted 20,000 old tweets last week, explaining, “It’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera, if trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new normal, this seems like a ‘why not?’ move.” Twitter isn’t for fun banter and a glimpse inside your favorite people’s minds in 240-character chunks anymore, it seems — it’s a potential weapon.

It could be argued that the true losers in this shifting dynamic are the fans. Celebrities will surely be less likely to share thoughts that win fans’ hearts, for fear of provoking corporate upset at some point in the future. We’re already living in a world where Kelly Marie Tran reportedly left Instagram because of fandom, which points to an oncoming sea change in the relationship between fan and celebrity cultures moving forward. Instead of being positive for both parties — celebrities building their brand and fan base, fans getting the chance to feel closer to their idols — it is increasingly becoming a more troubling and complicated arrangement in which neither side may get what they want. Given this outcome, is there even value in maintaining such a relationship?

Instead, the true takeaway might be watching as studios come to terms with the idea that everything surrounding the promotion of a project — if not the very existence of a project — can and will be weaponized by forces with their own agendas, and how they ultimately choose to adapt to this new media landscape. One potential positive sign was Adult Swim’s statement in response to a push to get Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon fired. The internet got to watch in real time as the network parsed out the idea of “what he said did not reflect our values, but we value him for his other strengths, and we stand by him anyway.” Disney has yet to master that message.

It’s likely an indicator of how bad things have become online that Rick and Morty offers a signpost to a better future. But at least this one comes without the threat of riots at McDonald’s.