In the middle of watching both Riverdale and Insatiable, I somehow found myself adding another high-school drama show onto my watch list when I stumbled upon Awkward. on Amazon Prime.
Riverdale maxes out on the Drama scale as the young cast are busy uncovering vast conspiracies and murder mysteries in between studies, while Insatiable satisfies comedic needs and offers a distinct narrative that weaves in and out of school grounds, as the protagonist is also a beauty pageant contestant.
Despite the efforts of the two shows on adding variety to the tired high-school TV genre, I found myself falling back on the traditional gossip-and-romance concepts in Awkward., and surprisingly have stuck around so far for two seasons.
Season Two seems to be the highest rated among critics and users with a 100% Tomato Score, but with more episodes and a steady decline in ratings for subsequent seasons, I’m unsure if it’s time to quit while I’m on top, or if I’ll be pleasantly delighted as it becomes my “one man’s treasure.”
Either way I figured now was a great time to share my thoughts on the show.
Awkward.
If you know nothing about the show, just recall Mean Girls.
Take chubby Regina George and her ditsy friend Karen, as they are very similar to Awkward.’s main antagonist duo Sadie and Lissa.
While Cady Heron, our main girl in Mean Girls, was a bit out of place in the social hierarchy because she was a beautiful but socially inept home-schooled international student, Awkward.’s Jenna Hamilton is just an average, under-the-radar girl that luckily starts a secret relationship with the most popular and hottest guy in school, Matty McKibben, during summer camp, but when the semester starts, Jenna gets stratosphere’d into infamy after an accidental slip in the bathroom hilariously rearranges the room to make it look like a failed suicide attempt.
However, any press is good press for the inconspicuously savvy Jenna, as her silent frustration of being the “Invisible Girl” elevates her into “That Girl” status, garnering the attention of students and staff alike.
But Jenna’s low social rank isn’t enough for Matty to go public with her, which eventually leads her to slip from Matty’s fingers and into the arms of his best-friend and class president, Jake Rosati, which finally leads us into the events of Season Two.
Boys and Girls
What!? A Love Triangle!?
Super cliche, yes, I know. But the show definitely knows that, and makes fun of the plot running into tired territory by openly self-deprecating in several scenes, even including a Twilight Edward vs. Jacob parody.
But by the end of Season Two, when Jenna eventually decides on staying with Matty, the theme of the last episode is also the retroactive theme of the entire season, which is how much impact and influence the boys have on the girls this season.
My favorite episode of Season One is the “Dead Stacy” episode, when Jenna cleverly remixes an old school traditional play into a roaring and relevant success, demonstrating that Dark-Horse quality and how Jenna is an extremely talented girl that just needs the right platform.
It got Jenna off of her introverted and hidden daily blog, and being proactive and charismatic in the real world.
However, in Season Two, Jenna seems more reactive. Hard to blame her, as she is being sandwiched between the two Alpha Males of Palos Hills High, but this quality also spreads to her friend Tamara and enemy Sadie, who both end up obsessing over serial-cheater Ricky Schwartz throughout several episodes of the season.
The male presence completely steals the personalities of the girls this season, and while it’s unfortunately repetitive for the viewer, it’s a great perspective into female nature, building on the previous season’s conflict about self-respect.
Interestingly enough, my two favorite characters on the show, Jake and Lissa, previously a couple in Season One, were also the characters to show the highest degrees of self-respect this season.
Lissa especially, finally establishes clear boundaries against Sadie, evolving from being her doting Hench-woman into an autonomous and graciously tolerant ally.
But even she is infected by the Boy-crazy Plague, drunkenly trying to crawl back to Jake during the Season Finale, but as a “Jissa” shipper, I’ll let this one slide ;)
Female Nature
Awkward.’s core strength is how forward and shameless it is with it’s humor and social commentary (the snide digs on Christianity are actually my favorite and the most clever segments of the show’s dialogue).
But what specifically impresses me most about the show is how honest it is about social and sexual dynamics, especially in regards to the female gender.
Sexual Pair Bonding
- Jenna “breaking rules” for Matty (the bad boy), but “making rules” for Jake (the nice guy). Observing the dynamics of their love triangle highlights how women are the gatekeepers of sex, but males are the gatekeepers of commitment.
- Jake is unable to purely use romance to overcome Jenna’s sexual pair bond with Matty (he took her virginity), but one episode shows an alternate reality where Jenna and Jake smash before the first date and Jenna falls into a “sex trance” (mistaking sex = love). This alternate Jake ends up leaving Jenna, as he was never able to develop deeper feelings and project an ideal of love onto Jenna through dating her.
- There is another alternate reality where Jenna doesn’t recklessly lose her virginity on the janitor’s closet floor and forbids sex with Matty, prompting him to publicly ask her out.
Promiscuity
- Jenna is ashamed to admit her first time to her friends.
- Various female characters using sexuality as a tool for self-confidence.
- Tamara confesses what really goes on when females go on their international European escapades.
- Lacey, Jenna’s mom, downplays the significance of virginity when she tells Jenna “every first time [with any new guy after the 1st] is a first time.”
- Safe for Lacey to say, as she only has two total sexual partners, but the effects of too much sexual freedom are observed with Lacey’s friend Ally, who admits to making a rush decision to settle down in marriage with a sloppy but wealthy man she is clearly not sexually compatible with due to her being past her prime and out of options.
Wrap Up
Awkward. really cements the fact that high school is a way bigger deal for girls.
For guys, it’s either you get girls or become a nerd to compensate if you don’t. God help you if you find yourself in between.
But for girls, sex is a lot more readily available, so status and social rank is the real territory. Slut-shaming is a female invention, and females are also the main culprits for cyber-bullying as they usually revert to covert means as opposed to open communication or even physical violence.
Basically, any time Jenna finds herself confused about her own behavior, it’s because she’s unconsciously fixated on status.
Why was she logically attracted to Jake but not sexually? He was awarding her status, something Matty withheld.
Why did she forward her blog to the whole school even though it exposed her friends and family as collateral damage (and why wasn’t it private to begin with when she freaked out over an anonymous commentator?) She wanted attention and status.
Season One dealt more with these themes, but I enjoyed when it did resurface or is caught always secretly running through the background.
Season Three and Beyond
I’m really happy the show kept the cast tight for S2 (wow, Jenna does wear a cast in S1, haha, nice pun).
While they kept Jenna’s arc relatively stable, the side characters grew in personality.
I was surprised when I stopped hating Sadie and waited in anticipation for her trademarked “You’re welcome” catchphrase.
After being explicitly sidelined in Season One, Ming branches out and bonds with her fellow Asian students, allowing the show to hilariously explore more cultural themes. I also saw some pictures of Ming in future seasons and glad she’s getting more of a style makeover.
Season Three still has a decent Tomato Score; it’s S4 & 5 that I may have to be worried about, although the individual IMDb ratings for all the series episodes average around an 8.
With 20 episodes, I hope S3 delivers something undeniable that I can justify finishing the show with.
What I’d really like to see is a return to form for Jenna, as I pretty much forgot why the two hottest guys in school even fell in love with her in the first place; classic female fantasy trope when a very average or un-charismatic female is randomly fought over by two higher status males (the reason for the success behind the vampire series Twilight and True Blood).
Valerie Marks, the counselor/recently promoted Vice Principal, is the truly cringe and awkward character of the show, and I look forward to seeing more of her bold intrusiveness into Jenna’s life and the rest of the school.
Lastly, definitely more of Jake and Lissa, preferably together.
Lissa is such a wild card as her status as a ditz makes you impressed when she does something smart. Not only is she the most attractive person in the main cast, she’s also the most religious. Great character to watch.
Jake also reminds me a lot of myself, as I too was a Class President who had attractive girls I didn’t care for hovering over me. Unfortunately, I also was made a fool as I drooled over a girl that ended up dissing me in the end. I hope he leaves Jenna behind for good and continues to dominate the social hierarchy.
UPDATE
I’ve finished the show. After season two, Jenna’s character really becomes a dumpster fire, and the only way to salvage the show is to fall in love with the side-characters and fast forward any moments where Jenna is either by herself or with her love interest.
Series Spoilers
The first time I knew the show was really good was when they made me able to empathize and even root for Sadie, the mean bitch antagonist.
In the later seasons, as Jenna’s character starts to degenerate, Sadie’s blunt nature actually elevates her into an arbiter of truth.
Although it took longer than it should have for her to mature, Sadie’s mean nature is excused after we see how troubled her home life actually is. It was damaging to her self-perception and is the reason why she sabotages all her relationships by being so mean to others.
For Jenna, our Heroine, we never really get to the bottom of why she’s so messed up. I’m happy she got her just desserts in Season Three, but seeing how inadequate she is after that really gets old.
- She’s fake and just adopts the personalities of the people around her.
- She has cheated on all her boyfriends (and does so again in the series finale.)
- She keeps secrets from her best friends and is never able to be honest even with herself.
- Over-analyzes everything and thinks it’s about her.
Jenna does admit that she struggles with self-love, and that’s why she sabotages her relationship with Matty in Season 3, but her moment of enlightenment doesn’t really materialize as she’s still floundering for the next two seasons.
Maybe she still secretly resents her parents?
By the end of it all, we just have to accept that Jenna is a very damaged girl that her boyfriends really should have avoided. She’s just a boring English major, and Sadie was the only one to see that Jenna was a glitch in the Matrix.
The show would have done a lot better if they strengthened the voices of their side characters over time so we could slowly let go of Jenna. She’s just a chameleon that has nothing to offer but sex.
Speaking of sex, it was also disturbing to me how much the female characters were so absorbed about sex and dating.
Ming was the only character that could survive the Bechdel test. However, even when she did get into a relationship, it was a lot different than her friends, as she wasn’t ready to have sex on prom night while her friends unceremoniously gave it up months ago.
It speaks volumes that Ming and Fred were cut for Season 4 after their arcs were completed. Fred and Ming had strong boundaries and a clear sense for their identities, and could have served as a gold standard for a healthy relationship. The show-runners cut them so we could get more of the blind leading the blind.
The show also slowly stops being as funny as it once was after the first two seasons. The adult characters remain the comedians, but the teens just get swallowed up in more drama. In one episode, the characters work at a country club and actually walk away and leave customers high and dry just so they could argue with each other, several times throughout the day.
If the show wasn’t going to be as funny anymore, I wish it at least got smarter, but it never does.
I suppose I overstayed my welcome because I was so impressed by how much I had in common with Jake Rosati, and was interested in his character development. I’m somewhat happy with his final arc in the last season, as he reunites with Lissa, briefly, and also decides to go his own way and not go to college.
But all this is undone in the final episodes as Lissa breaks up with him for not being ambitious enough to support her dream of being a housewife. However, she apologizes as she sees her mother settling for an un-sexy guy just because he has money.
But the fact that Lissa doesn’t get back together with Jake doesn’t clue us in that she’s really internalized the belief that Love > Money.
Jake ends up agreeing that his manager position at the country club shouldn’t be a life-long destiny, so he decides he’ll apply to college. However, we don’t know what he’s going to study, and he could easily end up just as dispassionate with his college-degree required career than he was at the country club.
Conclusion
I might re-watch those first two seasons again some day. There really was something magical about them.
But considering how the rest of the cast haven’t really blown up and been in anything good after this show, I have to admit this show is a flop.
I suppose the best takeaways I got from the show were:
- Never take back a cheater.
- Men are the real romantics.
- Parents can really mess up their kids.
