Hot dang, Hollywood and TV studios sure are desperate to reboot every last stagnant IP on the market. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Plain White T’s 2006 earworm “Hey There Delilah” is being adapted into a scripted TV series. The show will be a “romantic dramedy” that expands the long-distance relationship depicted in the song into a full-length narrative.
This is highly strange. “Hey There Delilah” is a song that tells the slightly creepy tale of a traveling singer-songwriter flirting through music to a university student in New York. Whatever distance exists between them physically and emotionally will be swallowed whole by this song, making it so they can be together. “I’m right there if you get lonely / Give this song another listen,” Plain White T’s frontman Tom Higgenson croons.
Here’s why it’s creepy: Delilah actually exists. Higgenson met Delilah DiCrescenzo back in 2002 when DiCrescenzo was a sophomore at Columbia University. A long-distance runner, Ms. Delilalh had a boyfriend at the time, so Delilah limited their dialogue to “just friendly conversation,” as she told ESPN The Magazine. Here’s what Higgenson told her: “I’m going to write a song about you.”
He eventually did write that song, annoyingly, and dropped the CD off at her parents’ doorstep. She listened to “Hey There Delilah” with her brother over Christmas break and wound up attending the 2008 Grammys with the band. Except this whole time she had a boyfriend! And she’s still with that boyfriend! As reporters hounded her about the song, asking about the nature of her relationship with the Plain White T’s frontman, Delilah had to emphatically state she was with her boyfriend.
But somehow this is the romantic narrative the people are clamoring for in 2018.
“It’s been more than a decade since ‘Hey There Delilah’ was released, and people always ask me about it. A whole lot of people really connected with that song, and I’m very proud of that,” Higgenson told THR. “I’m so excited to have an opportunity to give a new generation the chance to form their own connection with the song, and fall in love with its story through this new project.”
Anyways, Higgenson is teaming with Lively McCabe Entertainment and Primary Wave to develop the project. This month they’ll shop the TV series around and hopefully it won’t get picked up. But it probably will. Because people are desperate and enjoy nostalgia more than novelty. Hey There Delilah what’s it like Sellout City? Guess we’ll find out soon enough.
