Class Struggle
by Ken Tucker
If the WB's teens-in-turmoil prep school
drama, Young Americans, is any indication, the kids are not all right.
"It's time to throw
convention out the window!" announces a strenuously hip, shaggy teacher in
The WB's new summer drama Young Americans, and the show certainly tries
to wring new variations from some time-tested dramatic conventions. Since the
teacher- a steely gazing educator named Finn, played by Ed Quinn- follows his
proclamations by striding into a lake fully clothed to prove his
anarchy-espousing point, one is tempted to sat that, like him, Young
Americans is all wet. Buy while that would accurately reflect the show's
reliance upon predictable clichés, it wouldn't be fair to a couple of YA's
jaw-dropping plot strands. For instance, will you keep reading if I tell you
this is probably the first TV show that flirts with teen incest by trying to
make it seem like mere puppy love?
Set in a New England boarding
school located on the edge of a small working-class village, YA deploys
the old rich-kids-versus-townies motif as its central conceit, and embodies that
tension in it's main character, the inelegantly named Will Krudski
(apple-pie-faced Rodney Scott). Will's folks live and work in town- Mom's a
beautician; Dad seems to drink beer and glower for a living- but Will has just
been accepted to the tony Rawley Academy's summer session.
Will, we learn in tediously
earnest voice-over narrations, is awfully conflicted about this. His childhood
chums suspect him of turning all snobby, while his Rawley roommate, the preppy
Scout (chiseled Mark Famiglietti) wants his new friend to relax and enjoy the
jock jocularity of boarding school life. But Will's voice-over whine insistent:
"I've always seen my self as other's see me," he moans. "I plan
to be someone... But right now I'm just a guy who's trying to create his
life."
Clearly, series creator Steven
Antin, writer of some film called Inside Monkey Zetterland, has a poor
ear for the way 15-year-olds actually look. When these characters' ages were
disclosed in the first half of the premiere, the 15-year-old in my house hooted,
"Yeah right- they're like 25!" They should call it Young-Adult
Americans.
Anyways, got-it-all Scout
doesn't have a girlfriend, but hopes to snare on when he notices that the local
gas station mechanic is a flaxen-haired knockout named Bella, played with much
coy lip-licking Kate Bosworth. That Scout and Bella discover before the debut
episode is over that they share the same mother does not prevent them from
continuing to share lustful glances. "It's so creepy!" shrieked
my 15-year-old, as I shamefacedly retreated to another room to ponder my choice
of career.
YA also has a subplot
about a girl (Katherine Moennig) trying to pass as a boy at Rawley, but since
the school is coed and she say's she's straight, it's difficult to know why the
producers are putting Jake/Jacqueline- who could pass for k.d lang's son-
through this laborious masquerade. If much of YA seems as strained as the
T-shirts "Jake" wears, it at least avoids the unearned angst of the
summer's other 15-year-olds-in-school show, Fox's hapless Oppisite
Sex, which stoops to badminton just ot make a chap joke with shuttlecock
in the punchline.
Placed in the context of The
WB's other teens 'n' 20s shows- the giddy Popular, the goofy Charmed,
the garrulous Dawson's Creek, the grave Roswell, the great Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, and the glowing Felicity (which receives a cute
salute in YA's second episode)- Young Americans is okay. It's
sexual-confusion subplots alone will make for a summer's worth of sincere young
actors reducing its target audience of skeptical young people to shrieks of
appalled amsuement. C+(grade
it received)
