Faking It!

So MTV has been getting pretty darn good at this TV thing lately, it seems. Not a huge surprise, while they did invent reality tv, which I've never been especially fond of, they also had some of the best shows of my youth like Daria and Aeon Flux (and Undressed -- at least when I was eleven years old!)

So they came out with this show called Faking It, which I found out about completely randomly on youtube. I was curious, but skeptical. Luckily it showed up for free on Amazon Prime so I gave it a shot.

First episode, I still had some trepidation. I was like... There has to be some catch, something more to this. I mean if this is really a show about two straight girls pretending to be gay... then this is not something I'm going to be watching.

But, of course, in the last second of the first episode you find out one of the fakers, weeelll, she might be having a pretty easy time faking it.

And it pretty much gets better each episode. It feels a little like MTV's other hit romance romp, Awkward. Faking It isn't as funny or clever as Awkward, but I'd have to say that the characters on Faking It are a lot more sympathetic. Jenna on Awkward is just a straight up bad-ass. Everyone around her is crazy as fuck and that gets her into 'awkward' situations, but she herself isn't awkward. She's smart and collected and basically ready to take on all comers. So I mean, I root for her but I don't exactly relate to her -- I'm nowhere near as cool as she is.

Faking It gives us characters that are a little more flawed and a little more down to Earth. I mean, I'm not as cool as Amy either. But she's more conflicted. And even the evil popular girl -- confounded by her inability to lord over the school because of the school's inverse social structure that puts outcasts on top and barbies at the bottom -- even she ends up being pretty sympathetic.

I thoroughly enjoyed Awkward's first two or three seasons but the premise has run thin for me with all the constant back and forth between Guy A, Guy B, or Guy C. Faking It hopefully has a better plan for us. But even if it only lasts 18 episodes, it'll be a whirlwind knockout of a show. I'm curious where they intend to go with this set-up and I'm hoping it turns out to be a classic best-friend romance, we haven't seen that in a long time. At least not on TV.

I'm up to episode 6 of a disturbingly short 8 episode season, and #6 was the best so far. I mean, in most cases the whole threesome concept is thrown into a TV show as a lowest common denominator appeal to male fantasy. But gosh, the version in Faking It was fiendishly nerve-wracking in such a unique way. Imagine you're pretending to be in a relationship with your best friend who you are secretly in love with, and you're tasked with, um... pretending to have sex with this friend but you really want to have sex with her so you have to... pretend to pretend to have sex with her? That's an Oscar-worthy performance if you can pull that one off!

So, way to go MTV. I'm looking forward to finishing this season and I can't wait for next season of Faking It. I also can't wait for Finding Carter's season to end so I can watch that. But I still can't get into Teen Wolf. It's like a not-as-good version of The Vampire Diaries which I already gave up on in the third season. But I'm sure there's something great about it which I'm just not seeing.

New Series: Finding Carter

Escalation. We wear kevlar, they use armor-piercing rounds.

As you know if you read my blog, Switched at Birth roundly raised the bar on what kind of depth is required to compete in the world of good teen drama. The formerly ubiquitous 'rich teens behaving badly' motif has been replaced by sexy vampires and sexy werewolves. So to keep apt against such flashy aesthetics, grounded teen dramas had to fight back with the only recourse left to them: conceptual depth. Switched At Birth brought us all the dependable necessities of young love and parental showdowns, but with a complex family life and a unique cast of characters.

Earlier this week, MTV debuted a program which invites instant parallels to Switched at Birth. They both bring to life an extremely unique familial situation where a child is torn between more than one set of parents.

MTV's Finding Carter introduces us to a girl who was kidnapped as a young toddler, and then raised as her own by the kidnapper. At age 16, young Carter (real name: Linden) finds out everything she remembers about her entire life is a lie. In one fell swoop her entire world is taken from her, her "mother" is on the run from the law, and she's thrust against her will into a family of strangers. Now she struggles with her burgeoning feelings for her biological family, while refusing to let go of her love for the woman that raised her.

This is the kind of scenario that I, as a TV fan, dream of witnessing. A direct correlation where one great show inspires another. So far, Finding Carter seems to effortlessly walk that thin line where the influence is obvious, but the new material is genuine and legitimate without even the slightest hint of rehash.

Those first two episodes of Finding Carter were so fucking fantastic, almost 'next-level' shit. It fills my eternal soul with anguish that I can't watch the whole first season right now. This week to week thing, damn you terrestrial TV and your outdated, 1950s ways. Why couldn't this have been a Netflix series? If I want to watch this show properly, I'll have to wait until the season is done before I can watch the next episode!

While you can't possibly compare 2 great episodes to 40 great episodes fairly, I haven't rolled out the possibility that Finding Carter could be even better than Switched at Birth. And in any case, if this proliferation goes any further, we'll have undoubtedly entered the golden age of teen dramas. There have been so many amazing shows that have come before, but this new class of teen drama brings in a quantifiably more complex emotional dynamic that is highly difficult to usurp.