A year ago, I could have written a list of potential TV shows I would rather have sat through than watched another hour of thrilling insights into the lives of the rich and beautiful. A sitcom on ITV about, I dunno, the night shift at a slaughterhouse, complete with excruciating close-ups of cows being bludgeoned to death by a slack jawed halfwit played by Hugh Sachs, backed by an even more excruciating laughter track. BBC Three's Honey, I Killed The Groom!, a spin-off to Don't Tell The Bride, where the groom's best man has to try and convince the bride that her future husband wasn't accidentally run over by a lorry on his stag do. A second series of The Wrong Door. Anything but another TMF hourlong following an American teen who has a relatively mundane task to undertake and an entirely disproportionate amount of money to spend on it. Christ, these things have all the emotional depth of a JML informercial and roughly half the production values.
Things changed when I started watching Gossip Girl. It isn't perfect television, by any means. The cast are all so beautiful they manage to make your average British drama look like it was filmed in a hall of mirrors. Flick over to Hollyoaks after watching an episode and you'll think you've tuned into a Bodyshock documentary about John Merrick's family. Over the course of it's first season, it managed to turn into compulsive viewing, partly because of how the show managed to humanise the characters. Sure, they could buy off all African debt and still be on some kind of a Forbes list, but they're every bit as fucked up as everyone else. The queen bitch who needs everything to go exactly her way? Bulimia and daddy issues so messy, she manages to make the Gainsborougs look like the Sullivans. The absolute bastard who could have any woman he wants, cheat on her and most likely charm her into taking him back? Dead inside. The handsome, brooding millionare's son? Not a very good actor. It's total fantasy, but as any good fantasy writer knows, if you're not partly grounded in a world people can relate to, you've totally lost your audience.
Dizzy from the success of Gossip Girl, The CW commissioned 90210, an update of early 90's teen staple Beverly Hills 90210. It should have been their big show, the main feature to GG's B-Movie. Instead it ended closer to an hour long advert for spot cream. The characters are all completely toothless, even the big bitch. The 'kooky' friend runs a website with 'hysterical' flash animations about people she hates. She should turn fucking Juno off for a minute and pick up the call from 2003 asking for their gimmick back. Let's compare the average Gossip Girl plot to the average 90210 plot. In an episode of Gossip Girl a few weeks back, Blair tried to sabotage her mother's latest relationship, Serena had to deal with her new boyfriend wanting to be in an open relationaship, and Dan came damn near close to being able to bring down Chuck's father's company. In 90210's second episode, Dixon joins the lacrosse team, but keeps being sabotaged because he is the principal's son (NOT BECAUSE HE IS BLACK, YOU UNDERSTAND), Annie auditions for the school musical and meets a rich boy and Naiomi finds out that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Jeez, it's like comparing the Sinister Six to Swiper the Fox. I'm not saying that big, shocking storylines necessarily make a great series. But these are teen dramas, not Carnivale, and Gossip Girl had Cyndi Lauper guest starring and 90210 had Coldplay as their opening song and you get my drift, yes?
As well as launching 90210, The CW also put out another new piece of glossy, escapist nonsense this year. Presumably pitched as 'bitchy show for teens that can made on the cheap until the Pussycat Dolls need another member', Privileged came without any of the weight of expectation 90210 had, none of the star power and and achieved a fraction of the viewing figures. But as it turns out, it's one of this year's big surprises, a literate, bitchy, consistently entertaining slice of hokum that works far better than a) 90210 does and b) it has any right to.
Joanna Garcia is Megan Smith, a character so obviously based on Anne Hathaway's 2006 role that they may as well have called the show The Devil's Kids Wear Prada Too. Finding herself too shit to be a writer (because she doesn't know enough people or something, I wasn't really paying attention at this point). Somehow, she winds up getting a job as a tutor/nanny for two distressingly rich teenagers in Florida. The girls are supposedly twins, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense since the nice one (Rose; tiny, shrill, sort of pretty in the blandest way possible) is about three feet smaller than Sage, who sounds like she smokes sixty a day. Other characters include the girl's decidedly milfy (gilfy?) grandmother Laurel, and their chef Marco, who's a bit like a Lafayette from True Blood. 'Cept he's never given head in exchange for vampire blood. Unless there's some kind of astonishing reboot the producers are planning.
Anyway, the show works best if you think of it as a sort of Teen Vogue Arrested Development. It's so far removed from any normal person's life that it may as well be set on Pluto, but unlike 90210 or The Fabulous Sweet 16 Of..., it's got characters you would actually want to spend longer than five minutes with and actors who manage to make them three dimensional without constantly hitting the audience over the head with reminders of why they are the way they are. Ashley Newbrough manages the feat of not only justifying Sage's behaviour, but making her kinda likable too. Considering she spends a large amount of her time trying to sabotage the lead character, that's pretty damn impressive.
It's not without it's shortcomings. It'd be nice if quirky female singer/songwriters didn't soundtrack near enough every bloody scene, for instance, but if Privileged can avoid going down any obvious paths, plot wise and not give into the temptation of wrapping every episode up neatly (which, to it's credit, it largely manages to avoid), who knows, we could actually be onto something special here. It beats the hell out of Coming of Age, anyway.
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