Review: “High Fidelity” Season 1 (Hulu)
I have never read Nick Hornby’s novel, High Fidelity, nor have I watched the movie based on it, starring John Cusack. I have no regard for the source material, and barely any name recognition, so I’m probably the perfect test case to see if the new show on Hulu “works.” Sometimes, being too close to the source can warp your perceptions — for good or bad.
So with fresh eyes, on an offhand recommendation I saw online from someone who saw it in advance for review (I just read the elevator pitch, I wanted to go in with those aforementioned fresh eyes), I fired up “High Fidelity” late on Friday night after I was home from work. I could only get to the first two episodes before sleep threatened to overtake me — it was after 1 A.M. so cut me some slack.
I spent all day Saturday clamoring to get back to it.
*Light to medium spoilers for Season 1 follow*
“High Fidelity” follows Robyn ‘Rob’ Brooks (Zoë Kravitz), a used record store owner, and her friends/employees, Simon (David H. Holmes) and Cherise (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), navigate life in Brooklyn in their late 20’s.
Not the most original premise, obviously, so what kept drawing me back so determinedly?
For one, it’s a very well acted show. I thought I wasn’t really a fan of Zoë Kravitz, and then I realized… I’ve never seen her in any substantial roles?
A bit part in X-Men: First Class and a mediocre role in the Fantastic Beasts movies don’t really count, so I have no idea where that perception came from.
I’m glad I put that aside and watched “High Fidelity” because she’s excellent as Rob. She has to be, since Rob’s highs and lows have to carry the show the majority of the time — an aside in the finale for Cherise, and an unexpected pivot to Simon’s point of view for Episode 8 (Ballad of the Lonesome Loser), are the only times we leave Robin’s side. Kravitz let’s us peek inside Rob’s world, from her best times, at the local haunts in her neighborhood, to the worst, trapped in her apartment.
Trapped in her mind.
Trapped in the cycle of depression from her series of heart breaks — detailed early on when Rob lists (lists are important in this show) her Top 5 Worst Heart Breaks — starting with her most recent: her broken engagement with Mac (Kingsley Ben-Adir), featured in the opening scene of the show.
So we follow over Rob’s shoulder as, about a year later, she tries to pick up the pieces of her (once again) broken heart — and life. Along the way, she periodically steps back from the action to speak right to us (a trick that’s gained popularity in recent years, obviously, from Deadpool to Fleabag), which forces an even higher level of intimacy between the audience and the protagonist.
Like it’s recent contemporary, “Fleabag”, “High Fidelity” let’s you look behind the curtain of the lead’s pain. Unlike “Fleabag”, you aren’t invited to dislike Rob and blame her for her circumstances early on— pity and/or empathy are more appropriate — and so you grieve her failed relationships alongside her.
However, familiarity oft breeds contempt.
And so it is that, through the ebbs and flows of Rob’s life, you may vacillate between pity and hate, as you have to decide for yourself how complicit Rob is in her own misery.
As a peer of Rob’s, with similar struggles figuring out my own life — even if the details are wildly different — the struggle rang true to me. I’m not a black woman living in Brooklyn, and yet I still felt an incredible kinship with her. And her life feels vitally important, despite relatively low stakes, because of the way that Kravitz makes it feel like the world begins and ends with Rob’s.
Which, it turns out, is Rob’s problem. And that’s where the writing takes the baton.
We’ve seen these stories a million times: late 20’s/early 30’s ne’er-do-well trying to find their calling/place/significant other. It’s typically a guy (High Fidelity’s novel and movie versions featured a male Rob), sometimes he’s good at heart, sometimes he’s a bastard; it’s all in the journey, though, to a better place, or just a better state of being. TV show Rob seems content enough with her station in life — the shop could be doing better but she’s making ends meet — and while she puts herself down as a person, it’s mostly in regards to her ability to find love.
It’s about her ability to be loved.
You never really believe that Rob hates herself, from the perspective of an outsider, viewing her day to day existence and behavior. She doesn’t seem to fear a judge calling her a very bad person.
And the show doesn’t want you to, at least early on. It’s a powerful device; Kravitz’s wry sense of humor and pathos are married to a script showing a loner with a very tight circle — Cherise, Simon, her brother Jackson (Rainbow Francks), and her fling-turned-friend-turned-complication Clyde (Jake Lacy) — so when time passes on, and Mac returns to Brooklyn, the layers of Rob’s story begin to peel away. While you can’t go so far as to say Rob ever lies to us… she’s certainly guilty of lying to herself.
As for the rest of the cast? Simon, Jackson, Clyde, Mac and in particular Cherise do a great job making Rob’s own little world work. Simon provides the sympathetic ear that Rob needs. Jackson is the voice of reason (and kick in the ass) that Rob needs to realize how many problems she creates for everyone else, not just herself. While Mac is given a chance to be a real person in this dramedy, he functions mostly as a plot device; in either case, he is largely an idealized version of the man he is, for good and bad, until the last few episodes. Clyde gives Rob a tangible goal to work towards in her self-improvement; she shouldn’t fix herself FOR him, of course, but earning his forgiveness — and possibly his affection once more — are benchmarks she can measure hers progress against. Cherise always has her back, even when they aren’t getting along (boy do they but heads), but down the stretch she represents an opportunity to prove she can be selfless for real, breaking her cycle of self involvement.
When you put side the bells and whistles, cut through all the crap, and look at what this show is really about?
It’s one woman’s journey to fix herself, first by salving the pain she’s endured, then by treating the root causes.
And it’s not a journey you complete in 10 half hour episodes.
Stray Thoughts
- I couldn’t find an organic way to include my impression of the overall vibe nearer the top, but I experienced this show as an amalgamation of Clerks, Bojack Horseman, and the Edgar Wright catalogue; an adult that needs to grow up isn’t unique to his work, but the inclusion of all the musical queues — and indeed how central music is to the story — and even some fast cuts reminded me fondly of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Cherise was my favorite character in the show. She cracked me up almost every time she opened her mouth in the first few episodes, but after taking a backseat in the middle episodes, her sudden quietness reveals her own personal journey getting under way. I hope she gets an episode to herself in Season 2, the way Simon did in Ballad of the Lonesome Loser
- “High Fidelity” may have left an indelible mark on me, not just because of it’s quality and the way it made me feel, but for adding 2 expressions permanently to my lexicon: Cherise calls good wine “Unicorn Juice” and a woman that Rob and Clyde meet calls her cheating husband a “perfidious shitheel”
- This isn’t show specific, but “High Fidelity” was the first original show I watched on Hulu and good God they need to fix how they transition to commercials. I appreciate the brevity of the breaks, but they’re so jarring, and occasionally they were deployed with SEVERAL SECONDS LEFT IN THE SCENE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO ENDCAP. Just brutal
Verdict
I very much enjoyed my time with “High Fidelity”. It wasn’t perfect, but it was very good. It didn’t reinvent the wheel, but it did a damn good job of changing up the format and delivery of this sort of show. I can’t wait to see where it goes next.
Final Score: — 8.5/10 —
If you enjoyed this, read more from me here at The Spinchoon, and follow us on Twitter @TheSpinchoon & @AlessandroB1187. My most recent TV review was on Amazon’s Jack Ryan Season 2 ,but I also worked with the other Spinchoons on Jedi: Fallen Order, and my most recent Retro Review was on Lucky Number Slevin. We post three times weekly, on Sports, TV, Video Games, Movies, and more. We have a movie and beer podcast too: Flix & a Six.
