Generation Y

I suddenly feel so old… It’s only been in recent years that characters on TV were my age and, more terrifyingly, younger, so seeing a show about characters I could have gone to high school with is even more disconcerting… I had mixed feelings about this one going in, but figured I owed it to the class of 2001 to give ABC’s My Generation a shot.

Told as a documentary-style drama, My Generation puts a different spin on an old routine. The show’s conceit is that a documentary film crew has kept up with students from the class of 2000 over the past ten years after graduation. The show unabashedly focuses on cardboard cut-out stereotypes from high school (The Jock, The Nerd, The Rocker, The Rich Kid, The Prom Queen, etc). I’d be more critical of the blatant lack of originality there, but I can believe that a documentarian would likely do that on purpose, looking to high school clichés as a baseline, then seeing how it all panned out. My real problem with the show is how abundantly convenient everything was. It’s ten years later and all these people magically end up back in their home town so they can interact. The fact that it’s told in a documentary style somehow makes this more irksome and yet, less irksome, all at the same time for me. It’s hard to explain, for some reason, the fact that they are presenting this as reality makes me think, “Huh, what a random, crazy happenstance… Okay then.” On the other hand, all the ridiculous connections that happen would never really happen, so that makes the styles kind of a liability. Whatever the effect, I think they could have brought all these people together in less ridiculous ways.

As the pilot progressed, however, I decided to just kind of let it go. I decided to accept the conceit and just go with it. That helped immensely and made me like the pilot quite a bit more than I had. The documentary focuses on 9 classmates and looks at how their lives have changed over the past decade. For as much as I was eager to let the contrivances slide, some of them were just absurd. Of these nine people, the nerd who wants a house full of children ends up an infertile virgin, the punk ends up a pregnant army wife, the most driven kid ends up tending bar in Hawaii, etc, etc. There are mild contrivances and then there are CONTRIVANCES!!! Geez, one here or there would be one thing, but this show went out of its way to make sure that no one ended up where they expected to. Oh, and if that weren’t enough, apparently ever major event to have happened in the past decade affects one or more of these students directly. Enron, 9/11, Indecision 2000, you name it. It was honestly kind of fun to see how these events might affect a person’s path in life, but to see them all sitting next to each other just felt forced and self-indulgent. But, then again, most people are boring, so if this pilot employed any accurate veritas at all, I’d have fallen asleep ten minutes in, so I really shouldn’t criticize. I guess my main quibble is that it could have been done with more grace and creativity than it was.

For all its foibles and anvilicious contrivances, the pilot was enjoyable enough. The characters were likable and interesting for the most part, even if they weren’t original any conceivable regard. At the very least, the different format made them feel somewhat different, so that certainly helped. The main problem with this show (aside from the abysmal ratings) is that I only really cared about a handful of the 9 principal characters. As with most large ensemble casts, there are a few standouts, but there’s also a lot of filler. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’d spend half of every episode wishing they would go back to focusing on someone else. It’s like what happened with Grey’s Anatomy. When it got to the point where Yang was the only character I cared about, it was time to cut ties. I watched a whole of story about a whole lot of people that bored me just for the brief moments of goodness. Not. Worth it. In a perfect world, shows cut the dead weight, but more often than not, you just have to sit through the boring crap for a few glimmers of people you really care about.

The characters were decent enough, but the format is what really held the most appeal to me. The flashbacks to 2000 and current events of the past decade were kind of fun and the soundtrack from my high school days was downright eerie. Seriously, every song that would play would trigger this blinding bolt in my brain of “Oh dear god! Junior year!” It was kind of fun on a nostalgic level, but that feeling is immediately tempered by a remembrance of high school as a whole… [insert cold shudder]

All in all, I didn’t hate this pilot or anything, but I’m not real inspired by it either. On a purely soapy level, I could see this being a show I’d keep up with week-to-week, but I honestly have enough soap in my life. I give them credit for trying something a little new, and quite frankly, the format was the strongest part of the pilot, but this just isn’t a documentary that really has me breathless for more.

This pilot wasn’t without its charms, but I think I’d rather go watch a real documentary, thanks…

Pilot Grade: C