Kylie Jenner’s Bachelorette Weekend

This was inevitable. Six months ago when Kylie Jenner covered Vanity Fair, basically a press release announcing her acting ambitions pegged to her appearance in Charli XCX’s The Moment, for their spring issue that dropped right before the Oscars, it was only a matter of time. That time is now. Deadline reported yesterday that she will star in a new series, straight-to-order, on Hulu called Bachelorette Weekend. Kylie will also co-executive produce alongside Kim Kardashian.

The story here is that the bride, Kylie, is murdered during her bachelorette weekend, her body found in the pool. All the bachelorettes become the murder suspects so, presumably, the series will flashback and forward to what happened and who did it. Not the freshest of plotlines and of course that’s part of the early reaction to the news – Kylie and Kim, as we know, are consistently polarising and therefore enduringly popular. The announcement was met with the usual eyerolls and skepticism …and yet, for all the dragging that happens whenever Kylie and Kim do anything, it doesn’t necessarily result in a flop. All’s Fair, for example, is about to premiere season two in a few weeks. You can write that off as an example of Ryan Murphy’s bad taste but there has to be data that Hulu is looking at that justifies them getting even deeper in the Kardashian-Jenner business. Which means that for all the people who criticise the women of this family, there are also so many who keep watching – and/or the people who hate them can’t help themselves and keep watching. With Bachelorette Weekend, Hulu is banking on that contradiction, not on a Ryan Murphy project but that might actually be a good thing?

Bachelorette Weekend is adapted from an unpublished book by Flora Collins. Flora is the author of Nanny Dearest and A Small Affair and she’s the daughter of two prominent figures on the NYC arts and culture scene. Her father Bradley Collins Jr teaches art history at Parsons and her mother is Amy Fine Collins who was at Vanity Fair for over 25 years, known in publishing and in NY society circles as the guardian mother of the International Best Dressed List.

My point is, Flora has had access to observe a certain world, and has written about that world and its sub-communities in her novels. Three years ago when she was promoting A Small Affair, she was talking about her ideas for her next book, to be set “at an all-girls school in New York”, again an environment she would be familiar as she went to Chapin and then Vassar. As she said:

“The popular ‘mean girl’ in high school is a cliché — she peaks in high school, marries her jock boyfriend, has lots of children, loses her looks. I had a very different experience. I went to Chapin for 13 years,” then Vassar, “and a lot of the ‘mean’ girls’ I knew are going to end up on the Supreme Court…”

Doesn’t look like that book has been published yet… but is it possible that it evolved into something else, perhaps a television series about women who knew each other from their elite all-girls school and are now at a bachelorette party and one of them ends up dead?

Sorry to disappoint you but I’m already much more interested in that kind of a story from an actual insider in collaboration with the author of Before I Fall, Lauren Oliver whose work also has a similar “mean girls in high school” DNA with a twist. So there’s reason to believe that the creative team behind Bachelorette Weekend has something to say about clique dynamics and rich girl friend politics. Whether or not Kylie Jenner has the talent to be able to elevate those ideas is another matter, LOL. But I don’t know that we can dismiss the entire enterprise just because she’s the most high-key person involved.