CW’s The Republic of Sarah Is No Free State Project

The Republic of Sarah Updates: The CW is America’s newest broadcast network, having debuted in 2006, and its target demographic (women aged 13 to 34) isn’t much older. It’s the kind of network where you’re more likely to see future Pussycat Dolls than aspiring Lysander Spooners.

And yet, there it is The Republic of Sarah, a new CW drama in which a mob of hardbody high-school students and their state-smashing history teacher organize an anarchist rebellion, secede from the US, and make out a lot, which I’m sure Spooner would agree was a righteous strike against the state.

You might think I’m exaggerating, and you’re right. (I’m not sure if Spooner had an official view on French-kissing, but he didn’t think prostitutes should go to jail.) The Republic of Sarah, on the other hand, is the most deliriously ridiculous TV political mashup since a soon-to-be-defunct British satellite channel ran a sitcom about you-know-who called Heil, Honey, I’m Home!

Sarah Cooper, an educator in cute-as-a-rustic-button Greylock, New Hampshire, is played by Stella Baker (Tell Me Your Secrets).

All About The Republic of Sarah

When a mining company arrives in town after discovering lucrative coltan ore nearby, she’s in the middle of training a Revolutionary War regiment. (If you recall, coltan was used to make some of the Terminator movies’ robots.) Your harm is well beyond what we can help you with here.

Seek assistance right away.) What the townfolk lack in knowledge, they make up for in belligerence—”You don’t have to dumb yourself down to fit in,” Cooper advises a teen relocating from LA. “We don’t need a bunch of flatlanders taking over!” exclaims one of them to the miners before they’ve even blown a leaf in the air.

The corporate stormtroopers, like the four-flushing, mustachioed villains of dinner-theater melodrama, fall short of expectations. Naturally, the first thing they do is demolish a charming pagoda in the town square because, as everyone knows, pagoda-crushing is a lucrative business. And Cooper, still agitated by her Revolutionary War lesson plans, believes that they must be stopped before declaring war on park benches, flower boxes, and playful kittens.

Even by Hollywood’s charitable standards, the first episode of The Republic of Sarah was created by screenwriters who were clueless.

A river changed course when Canada and the United States were drawing the boundary in the premiere episode, and no one cared to restore it. Jeffrey Paul King, the show’s writer-producer, is also the creative force behind CBS’s modern Sherlock Holmes program Elementary.