Clueless Is Back. And Cher Is the Parent Now.

Somewhere in Beverly Hills, Cher Horowitz has just discovered the cruelest plot twist of all.

She has a teenage daughter.

More than 30 years after Clueless became one of the defining comedies of the 1990s, Alicia Silverstone is returning as Cher for a new Paramount+ sequel series. The show will pick up decades after the original film, with Cher now successful in business and apparently pretty confident that she has mastered motherhood. Then her daughter reaches high school and, rather beautifully, Cher finds herself feeling clueless all over again. Production is due to begin in Los Angeles in 2027.

It is difficult to think of a more perfect way to bring the character back.

The original Clueless worked because Cher was simultaneously completely confident and frequently completely wrong. She genuinely believed she could fix everyone around her, whether they wanted fixing or not, while somehow remaining one of the most likeable characters in 1990s cinema. Now she gets to experience the opposite side of that equation: being the parent watching a teenager make decisions with absolute certainty while knowing almost nothing.

As if.

There is also some serious pedigree behind the new series. Original writer-director Amy Heckerling is returning as an executive producer alongside Silverstone and producer Robert Lawrence, while the writing team includes Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the duo behind The O.C. and Gossip Girl, plus Freakier Friday writer Jordan Weiss. If you were designing a team to make a glossy show about wealthy teenagers, questionable decisions and complicated relationships, that feels fairly close to cheating.

And unlike plenty of Hollywood revivals, Clueless has something genuinely interesting to play with.

The 1995 movie was essentially Jane Austen’s Emma transported to Beverly Hills, but it also became a time capsule of its own era: the fashion, the language, the mobile phones, the mall culture, the music and the wonderfully specific confidence of being a teenager in the mid-1990s. Cher navigating TikTok, smartphones, social media, dating apps and whatever teenage language currently makes parents feel 300 years old could be very funny indeed. The trick will be resisting the temptation to spend every five minutes pointing at something from the original and shouting, “Remember this?”

Because nostalgia only gets you so far.

The smartest legacy sequels understand that audiences aren’t really asking to see exactly the same thing again. They want the characters they loved to have actually lived during the years we didn’t see them. What happened to Cher? Who did she become? Is she still relentlessly optimistic? Does she still try to reorganise everyone else’s life? And, perhaps most importantly, what happened with Josh?

There is no word yet on whether Paul Rudd will return, and no other casting has been announced.

But if Paramount+ can make the new Clueless about growing older rather than simply remembering being young, there might be something surprisingly lovely here.

Thirty-one years ago, Cher thought she knew everything. Now she has a teenage daughter who probably thinks exactly the same thing.

Good luck, Cher.