Honestly, we didn’t need another truthful teen show. After the juvenile unease we got from Skins and MTV’s redundant—and cancelled—U.S. version, the last thing television needed was more kids having sex, doing drugs, and spewing cultural reference-laden bon mots.
But MTV’s been keen on reclaiming its naughties influence as the definer of a generation. Only recently did the network realize that to do that these days, it didn’t always need to intrigue with “reality” (The Hills) or provoke with the harsh, Larry Clark-inspired realities of kidulthood (Skins). Through its new series Awkward, MTV hasn’t just gotten real with its audience; it dares to entertain and—perhaps not since, well, ever—even empower them.
A younger ‘girls’
Sure, Awkward starts with sex—and yes, the rough, blundering teen kind—so as to underscore its title, but we’re also introduced to a believable protagonist. 15-year-old Jenna Hamilton is a nobody-girl who’s extremely self-aware of her station in life and waiting for the right cue to depart from it. That happens on the last day of summer camp when she gives her virginity up to douchey dreamboat Matty McKibben, a guy who’s got Clooney’s smiling eyes and the grin of an ‘80s Sean Penn. She begins her Thought Catalog-like monologue acknowledging that the removal of her braces led to Matty finally getting on top her in a broom closet. But before you make any comparisons to some crappy show like The Secret Life of the American Teenager, she clarifies, “This wasn’t the inciting incident of some sappy teen special about how I got knocked up on the last day of summer camp. I knew better than to bareback.” When Matty overrules any post-coital social advances in their relationship, telling Jenna, “No one can know I like you,” she acquiesces.
By this point in the pilot, we would have been fine with something like The Secret Sex Life of an American Teenager but Awkward doesn’t play it that safe. After camp, a letter from a mystery sender calls Jenna out on her drippy teen bullshit. “Stop being such a pussy,” it tells her, apart from other self-improvement directives in the form of bitch slaps. After the epistolary beating, Jenna tries to stabilize herself with two aspirin, but of course a show called Awkward won’t let her: she chokes, stumbles, gets wrapped in a quarter-body cast, and starts her first day at Palos Verdes High known as that girl who tried to kill herself. Not bad for someone who wanted a bit of high school’s most volatile currency: attention.
There’s no shortage of teen tension on Awkward but it’s balanced masterfully with triumph. High school in this show isn’t as structured as narrowly as its hallways thanks to characters who are comically familiar but refreshingly complex. Try Sadie Saxton for size—literally the biggest bitch in school who matches the sinister “Thank you” of Popular’s Nicole Julian with her own malicious “You’re welcome.” She’s also as four-faced as Regina George, except that unlike the latter, her weight has always been a problem. (Fat cheerleaders: intriguing). As for Jenna’s BFF, Tamara, she’s no mopey sidekick who gets overly sensitive to her friend’s imminent social blossoming; in fact, she milks it, using a party Jenna’s semi-sorta invited to as a photo-op with the popular kids. Even Jenna’s mother stands out as a teen queen-turned-teen mom whose idea of love is offering her daughter a boob job. This is a woman who, when confronted with Jenna’s supposed suicide attempt, wonders, “Why can’t she be like any other teenager and starve herself?”
A juvenile show for mature audiences
Jenna isn’t like any other teen because she’s spliced from the best of her film forebears—the resilience of Samantha Baker, the inherent kindness of Cady Heron, the impudence of Olive Pendergast, and, okay, Juno’s cheek. We’re thankful it doesn’t take her a whole goddamn season to learn to work with what she’s got. Even with one arm in a cast, she volunteers the other for a pep rally that reaps both embarrassment and numerous friend requests. When Sadie takes a locker room shot of Jenna’s “itty-bitty titties” and posts it online, our girl thumps her chest and re-exposes herself to the school in her own terms. And though she continues to put out for the gradually endearing Matty, Jenna doesn’t put up with all his shit, either, especially when Matty’s best bud Jake starts showing her the outward affection she never got from him.
The idea of watching a teen show in an age of more distinguished television deterred me at first, but I’ll now admit that lately, I’ve been taking notes from a 15-year-old girl. You know a teen show is good when non-teens glean something significant from it. The kids who’ll be watching the show will get their too-clever millennial dialogue and sex euphemisms, liberal cussing, and enough adult situations for high school freshmen to find themselves in. But the show’s got an ageless attribute that asserts the importance of the teen genre: that no matter the uneasy situations that threaten us, we won’t get to ourselves if we can’t put ourselves out there. Embarrassment, from a blog entry or shameless staring at a boy as Jenna is wont to do, at least equals experience.
It’s a reminder that a guy at a low point in his adulthood needed. As a 27-year-old relatively new New Yorker, the skyscrapers can feel like towering lockers and it’s easy to feel claustrophobic and invisible in this city. Add to that the body cast I felt like I was in recently, my confidence stifled by unemployment and a bedbug-infested apartment. Still, Jenna Hamilton’s gotten me to embrace the realization that I haven’t mastered life yet, which is why I need more of it. From her, we learn that in high school as in life, there are no perks to being a wallflower.
Jenna Hamilton’s awkward phase will pay off later on, of course. Luckily for us, every step of it is something we can learn from and enjoy.