100 Favorite Shows: #96 — High Fidelity
“Half of the neighborhood thinks we’re washed-up relics. The other half thinks we’re nostalgic hipsters.”
Author Nick Hornby is best known for his 1995 romance novel and character treatise, High Fidelity. Its reputation has been buoyed over the past quarter-century because of a 2000 film adaptation of the book, starring John Cusack. In 2020, however, Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka took the story and reworked it for a modern sensibility and sexual diversity and slated it to debut on Disney Plus. Eventually, the story moved to Hulu for a Valentine’s Day release before being unceremoniously canceled in August after just one season. Centered around Crown Heights resident Rob (Zoë Kravitz), High Fidelity had new life, but still supported the core premise: a record shop owner lists their top five heartbreaks.
(Spoilers for High Fidelity will be sprinkled in throughout this essay. Read with caution, if that sort of thing makes you wary.)
My top five all-time High Fidelity episodes: “Uptown,” “Fun Rob,” “Weird… but Warm,” “Top Five Heartbreaks,” “Track 2.”
“Uptown,” the fifth episode of High Fidelity (co-written by Kravitz with E.T. Feiganbaum), sees Rob hitching a ride with Clyde (Jake Lacy) to the Upper West Side where she plans to respond to an advertisement from a woman named Noreen Parker (Parker Posey) about a collection of rare vinyls she wants to move. As the owner of an alternative record shop, Rob leaps at the chance (and as a devotee of Rob’s affection, Clyde leaps at the opportunity to drive her, too), only to find that these unicorn records (including an original issue of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World, complete with misprints) represent something beyond a musical legacy. Noreen is selling them all for just twenty dollars as revenge against her dickish husband.
It’s a story line that is not quite taken from the original novel or the Cusack film (it’s a take on the former and an homage to a deleted scene from the latter), but it’s also a detour that leaves Rob immediately conflicted. On the one hand, she’s a struggling shop owner who shouldn’t even consider passing up twenty dollars for the riches in these rare records. On the other hand, she doesn’t know Noreen’s husband and she feels wrong to steal from someone who might be perfectly pleasant. We’re seeing just one side of the story, but Rob, ever the empath, looks for the entire board.
Rob is obsessed with music. It’s right up there in the top five passions of her life, along with hanging out on staircases and romance, to be sure. If Rob and I swapped places, I’m sure she’d be deep into a project called “The Music Project: 100 Favorite Records” right now. Her passion for it bridges all genres and all eras. There’s the adoration for Bowie’s early records (some of my favorite music ever created) and more modern, atmospheric jams in the realm of The Roots’ “You Got Me” and Frank Ocean’s “Nikes.” There’s a devotion to the entire lineage of her favorite styles, as well as belief that the medium’s future should be one that’s free and accessible as Wi-Fi is and as healthcare should be. To bring these vinyls to Championship Vinyl would be to share previously unheard artistry with people who might have walked right by the shop and never thought to listen or explore.
However, she just can’t bring herself to pull the trigger on the deal. It feels immoral to her because from her, Clyde’s, and Noreen’s point of view, the owner of the albums is a douche who doesn’t deserve them. But Rob knows there are people in her life who might feel the same about her. She can’t justify his bad decisions anymore than she can justify her own. The episode spells it out as much in Clyde’s closing discussion with Rob (that also reveals he swiped the Bowie) — it’s hardly any more possessive of subtext than musical theater tends to be. Rob curses herself for acting in a moral manner, but even if it wasn’t a practical decision, it was still a vital one for the learning curve Rob embarks on throughout High Fidelity.
By revisiting the heartbreaks of her past, Rob takes a stroll down Heartbreak (not Penny) Lane, edifying her own present romantic sensibilities through the cringe-inducing moments of her youthful flings. The show only managed one season, meaning we leave Rob with a lot that she still had to learn. Her character had progressed by the conclusion of season one, but the development was clearly structured to be an overarching one. Even when Rob understands the faults in her past behavior, she still tends to fall into the same trappings of fuck-it-uppery that caused her to view herself as hate-worthy in the first place. It’s like when you finally try to quit Twitter, but you don’t make an actual plan to commit to that so you find yourself scrolling through it a few days later. You have to consciously accept that change to your behavior is needed before any change can be enacted.
Much of this sense of acceptance comes from the fourth wall breaks on the part of Rob. As she regales us with the stories of her prior flings, she comes to understandings, occasionally mid-monologue. Some past break-ups are actually all Rob’s fault, even though she’s continued into her life presuming herself to be a victim of unlucky love. In the original novel, this comes through first-person narration, but the fourth wall breaks almost make them seem more intimate, as if Rob is in our living room. Or maybe I just find Zoë Kravitz more engaging than John Cusack (whom I still love very much, thank you!). Either way, High Fidelity is a lesson in reckoning with your shitty behavior in real time.
In “Fun Rob,” we get to see some of these horrible, romantically-inclined decisions play out in real time. After going out for her birthday, Rob receives a call from Clyde, who asks Rob to get together for drinks to celebrate. She agrees to meet up with him before she is immediately distracted by similar wishes on the part of Mac (Kingsley Ben-Adir, a damn charming actor who should be in every rom-com forever), the ex-boyfriend she can’t get over, no matter how much affinity she harbors for Clyde. Instead of doing anything productive with Mac after ditching Clyde, Rob instead decides to reveal that she cheated on Mac after he proposed to her months prior. The behavior is self-destructive in every conceivable way and it reminded me that, even though Kravitz is unbelievably personable, she’s still Rob from High Fidelity. Few fictional characters could be as insufferable as that.
Rob is not the only one on the hook for this, though. The men in her life are almost constantly enabling the behavior. Later in that same episode, when Rob is locked out of her apartment, Mac actually returns with a key to let her in. “Lucky for me,” she says, with obvious chemistry between them. It’s one of the fastest 180s the genre has ever seen and a testament to the fact that yes, even Mac can’t stay away from Zoë Kravitz.
The romantic entanglement comes after Rob parties with the two iPhone contacts she equates (in nonlinear fashion) to the crumbs at the bottom of a chip bag, Tanya (Tara Summers) and Squid (Ben Jacobson). (Regarding Squid, Rob says, “”Squid used to be in this amazing shitty punk band back in the day.” It’s an oxymoron that only fully makes sense to music aficionados who understand the purest intentions behind every EP. I don’t count myself among these experts.) Together, they engage in birthday shots that help fuel much of Rob’s terrible decision-making processes for the rest of the night. Could High Fidelity ever hope to climax over anything but drunkenness?
The place Rob occupies in the city is distinctly correlated to the concepts of individualized adulthood and modern city living. Rob has no responsibilities in “Fun Rob,” sans the operation of Championship. As a result, she lets go and sees where the night takes her by texting who she can and crossing the streets to find the nearest, hippest (yes, my concept of youth is the adjective, “hip”) clubs to attend. It’s a particular brand of adulthood that is tied to notions of freedom and being able to party until five in the morning and waking up the next day and running three miles. It is also juxtaposed against Clyde’s more traditionally put-together attitude towards his own adulthood. (Something as simple as dry cleaning strikes Rob as something for “older people,” even though her generation is aging all the time.)
It’s these conflicting lifestyles that also speak to the tone with which High Fidelity tackles the subject of Crown Heights gentrification. It’s addressed expertly by Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair’s “The Best TV Shows of 2020, So Far”. He writes,
“High Fidelity’s rich sense of place has a beguiling pull, illustrating a borough’s pleasures (the cozily shabby bars, the fluorescent glow of bodega lights on a summer night) next to its pains — particularly the looming realities of gentrification, and what that does to a neighborhood’s hard-won soul.”
I don’t pretend to fully grasp every cause and effect of gentrification, but even I, a native of Massachusetts, could see that the city we see in High Fidelity is one in a state of immense change. It no longer belongs to its core inhabitants and it needs people like Rob, who feel like an honest stitch of fabric in the city’s worn soul, to keep its vibrancy genuine and never manufactured.
Ultimately, the main appeal of High Fidelity was just getting to hang out with Zoë Kravitz for ten episodes over Valentine’s Day weekend earlier this year. (Though, it was also easy to become as equally enamored with her Championship friends and colleagues, Cherise (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Simon (David H. Holmes). Even if this pair did have a conversation about how the anti-hero movement on television that was spearheaded by The Sopranos was “bullshit.”) Kravitz had more than earned her spot as the lead of a television series and the fact that it took the form of one of the apparently most re-tellable stories we have is just the icing on our gentrified cupcakes. Rob may be deeply flawed, but she’s also incredibly cool and has chemistry with everyone she meets. Spending time with her was as dope as spending time with Kravitz (dope as hell, I expect).
No matter what form the story takes, High Fidelity is, at its core, the story of an adult-child’s obsession with music. (Unhealthy fandoms also happen to be a hallmark of Hornby’s stories. Just look to Fever Pitch. Go Sox!) It’s a story that appeals to my own devotion to list-making (my Letterboxd profile has as many lists as there are days in the year, one of my favorite podcasts is Goodbye Mello Brick Road, and don’t even pretend you haven’t read Saoirse Ronan Deserves an Oscar) and makes me wonder about this project to which I’ve devoted so much time. How different is Rob’s obsessive collections and top five lists from my own “100 Favorite Shows” endeavor? I might have more in common with Rob than I think. I’ll just have to hope my own love life steers far away from Crown Heights — and more than five heartbreaks.
(Check back on Monday for #95, as we’ll be taking the weekends off!)
