Entertainment Weekly
Class Struggle
If The WB's teens-in-turmoil prep school drama,
Young Americans, is any indication,
the kids are not all right. by Ken Tucker
"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 proclamation
by striding into a lake fully clothed to prove his anarchy-espousing point, one
is tempted to say that, like him Young Americans
is all wet. But 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 its 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 Calhoun (chiseled Mark Famiglietti)
wants his new friend to relax and enjoy the jock jocularity of boarding school
life. But Will's voice-over whine is insistent: "I've always seen myself as
others 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, Steven Antin, writer of some film called
Inside Monkey Zetterland, has a poor ear for the way
15-year-olds speak and think. But then, he and The WB casting department have a
flagrant disregard 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.
Anyway, got-it-all Scout doesn't have a girlfriend, but hopes to snare one
when he notices that the local gas station mechanic is a flaxen-haired knockout
named Bella, played by 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 says 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 Opposite Sex
(premiering July 17), which stoops to badminton just to make a cheap joke with
shuttlecock in the punch
line.
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. Its 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 amusement.
C+