“You can put it anywhere.” With those words, Sarah Michelle Gellar sent a shockwave through a generation of schoolboys. We knew what she meant – but her breezy sexuality was more than we could comprehend. Our hopes were to get our hands up skirts or into bras, and lord knows what we’d do once we got there; Gellar showed us how small our world was.

Older and imperceptibly more worldly, we will all fondly greet the news that she’s back, playing the character who uttered those words: Kathryn Merteuil, the scheming schoolgirl of the 1999 film Cruel Intentions. She pictured herself on Instagram alongside the film’s director Roger Kumble and producer Neal Moritz, to announce that she’s joining a TV series that catches up with the characters years later: “That’s right ‘everybody loves me, and I intend to keep it that way’ #kathrynmerteuil is back!!”

This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.

The reboot centres around Bash Casey (played by Taylor John Smith), who is the son of Sebastian Valmont – at whom Merteuil cooed come-ons all those years ago. Casey finds his dad’s diary, and he is, per Variety, “introduced to a world of sex, money, power and corruption he never could have imagined”.

You can see why it got commissioned. It is already clearly pitched at the same soapy milieu as Gossip Girl and Revenge, which share a devoted demographic of people entirely incapable of spotting plot twists. Add to that the advertiser-friendly tranche of society who saw the film in their teens, for whom it casts a nostalgic spell, and you have a viable audience.

But, like Scream and endless other TV reboots, it is caught in a paradox: by making it, the producers dilute the very nostalgia on which the commission relies. (Incidentally, the film sequels don’t matter, as they were too blandly pornographic for even us teenage boys to bother with – although Amy Adams is in the first one, pub quiz fans). For now, the film is a honeyed glimpse into a world of grown-up emotion; by bolting it into a broader narrative universe, its impact is dulled.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the film is based on the eternal source material that is Les Liaisons Dangereuses. There are so many wonderful details in the film: where the racist Bunny Caldwell (Christine Baranski) stumbles as she asks for brown sugar; the sunlit string of saliva in the lesbian kiss; the soundtrack, which launched a thousand Audiogalaxy searches for Marcy Playground; the acknowledgment of Tara Reid, that Zelig of late-90s teen films. But it would have been nothing without Valmont and Merteuil: a double helix of lust and self-loathing. It will take America’s best writers to go toe-to-toe with Laclos.

In the show, Merteuil has moved on from the scandal of her youth, with a rich husband and a job at a youth rehabilitation programme; the arrival of Casey and the wronged Annette (played in the film by Reese Witherspoon, who isn’t returning) will disrupt it. This is solid dramatic turf: how we’re ashamed at our younger selves, but know they still contain our true personality.

But even if it’s a success, something is ruined when characters are given new life. The end of a film lifts them into our imaginations; a TV reboot tethers them back on earth.