If Mean Girls happened today

Amy Nicholson talks fast. That’s not a bad thing, but it is indicative of the film critic’s MTV podcast, which unfolds at a pace that could almost be described as frantic. In the premiere episode of the podcast’s second season, she interviews an author, two actors, and a costume designer in just 30 minutes, with none of them feeling shortchanged by the brevity of their conversations. The focus of this season is high school movies, and kicking off this exploration is Rosalind Wiseman, who wrote Queen Bees And Wannabes, the book Tina Fey used as the launching point for the now-classic Mean Girls. Wiseman’s chat is the most illuminating of the two, if only because the high school landscape has already changed so much since she wrote the book. She discusses how the rise of social media would affect the film’s characters, as well as how that’s changed the fabric of bullying in the modern age. Nicholson’s chat with Holland Roden and Shelley Hennig of MTV’s Teen Wolf is less interesting, but things pick up again with Can’t Hardly Wait costume designer Mark Bridges, who discusses ’90s fashion and how he came about dressing each member of the film’s ensemble.