90210

This week, we are doing a show whose title is a postcode.  Only, it’s called a zipcode in American.  As always, they’ve taken a concept and given it a jazzy name that deserves the sunglasses face emoji, and we’ve made it sound ornamental and begrudgingly functional, like a National Trust tearoom.  But this isn’t just any postcode, this is 90210.  Even the sequence of numbers can conjure images of sexy beaches and palm tree-lined boulevards: yet another challenge of growing up British, where my home postcode was KT22 9PE.  What did that tell you about the place?  Not much, beyond the fact it was a forty-minute drive from Kingston-Upon-Thames, which wasn’t even a real town, but a bit of London with its own John Lewis.  But 90210 wasn’t aspirational due to its digits, but because of its association with Beverly Hills, 90210, the teen programme that ran for the whole of the nineties and from whose memory this week’s show emerged years later in 2008.  From a young age, I knew 90210 to be a thing, but I thought Beverly Hills was just a famous lady or one of my mum’s friends with an impulse perm.  Either way, at the age of 23, a version of the IP came along for me on e4 and I was hooked from the start.

Ticking my first box was the setting.  We had both the fish-out-of-water schtick, and shiny US high school.  The initial premise revolved around the Wilson family, returning to LA from down-to-earth Wichita to look after a grandmother (played by Arrested Development’s and Archer’s Jessica Walter).  Through the eyes of their kids, we entered a privileged world, adopting a trope done so many times before.  In fact, at one point, 70% of all television was about people coming to LA who were not from there and having to stay true to their hearts while existing alongside dogs in handbags.  But what about the bloody kids?  There was biological daughter Annie.  She was a dick.  Well, not really, but I remember getting more and more annoyed by her over the course of the five series.  A highlight for me was her taking part in the school production of Spring Awakening, but only because it was a play I had studied in its original German (shout out to all my Frühlings Erwachen fans yeah) at university.  She was a good kid who made bad choices so often, it became fun to watch her suffer.  On the other hand, her adopted brother, Dixon, also had the same appalling track record, but was able to laugh most things off with a little chuckle that was his response to everything.  Tristan Wilds had previously appeared in a series of The Wire, but as I watched that after 90210, I was alarmed to see this Beverly Hills jock as a child drug dealer.  But then I remembered about acting and that.

Joining Annie and Dixon at high school are a parade of beautiful people.  Memorable among them was Naomi, running the show as chief mean girl, but also dominating the script with all the best lines.  But don’t worry, she learned there was more to life than being cool when she fell for one of the school geeks and dressed up as a Na’vi from Avatar for him.  She looked really convincing.  Her best mate was bad girl Adrianna Tate-Duncan, who combined teen pregnancy with drug abuse, all while I don’t think anyone ever explained her double-barrelled surname.  Not that it needs explaining, but you rarely see these in fictional characters, so I have been obsessed with it ever since.  I enjoyed self-righteous scarf-wearer Silver, but she often veered into being nothing more than a conduit for mental health storylines.  Similarly, Teddy went from background jock to reason to have a coming out storyline.  90210 aimed well in its attempts to tackle issues, but they were always wedged into the plots like shirts you can’t fit in a wardrobe because it’s too full of hangers.

I’ll dwell briefly here to slag off Navid as well.  I enjoyed his Iranian mother getting disappointed by him, but his need to wear waistcoats over t-shirts can, I realise now, be blamed for some terrible outfit choices of my own.  And he had a weak chin, which, as we all know, should never ever be teamed with boyband hair.  Unacceptable.  But if this new generation weren’t enough to draw in the viewers, the stars from the original Beverly Hills, 90210 also cropped up in the high school corridors, providing continuity but only if you had paid attention to old storylines from around a decade beforehand.  I hadn’t, so I would lose myself in tracing the plastic surgery lines on their faces while they did their acting and failed to hide the joy behind their eyes that they were being paid to work again.

Ultimately, the descriptor for this show is unashamed.  Everything 90210 did, it did unashamedly, legitimised by its predecessor.  It was unashamedly Californian and unashamed in reflecting that aesthetic.  It was welcome as an escape from drizzly London life, particularly when I remember the terrible roles and low salaries I fulfilled and earned at the time of its broadcast.  I could ignore being dragged into adult life by looking at wealthy American teenagers.  These days, grown-up reminders slap me in the face every time I open my eyes: my friends have birthed further babies, my conveyancers want more bank statements or colleagues need actual line managing.  My postcode now has SW4 at the front, which you either associate with a chavvy festival for pill-heads or with a London suburb so preoccupied with brunching and Instagraming that someone has thoughtfully spray-painted “welcome to Wankerville” on the railway bridge as you enter Clapham.  I know where I’d sometimes rather be: in Beverly Hills (the bit in LA, not inside my mum’s friend).

The Vampire Diaries

Right, well it’s been 37 posts since we’ve had anything about vampires, so I thought I might as well chuck the old classic show Vampire Diaries into the mix.  I haven’t finished a boxset in a while, and it seems readers can’t get enough of teen fodder from our younger years (I’m looking at you, everyone who read about Gossip Girl), so why not?  Let me, as a 33-year-old man, write about a show aimed at teenage girls, that I mostly watched when I was a 20-something-year-old man.  And then you can read it and, together, we can all take a quick break from the monstrous season that is Christmas time.  If, like me, you’ve looked on in disgust while office co-workers shovel a month’s worth of advent chocolate into their gobs on a single day, or you’ve had to restrain someone physically from cracking out the festive playlist on Spotify before the end of November, then really ‘tis the season for the bloodsucking undead as an antidote to empty yuletide greetings at the end of every email.

On paper, Vampire Diaries is an exercise in ticking almost every box regarding my preferred televisual themes.  It’s set in an American high school, so all the characters get to hang out in front of lines of lockers on an impossibly glamorous campus, in stark contrast to my old school, the misleadingly posh-monikered Howard of Effingham, where lesson changeovers were characterised by bundles, high-up banister daredevilry and acne.  So far, so much escapism.  Secondly, we have the supernatural.  As if the pressures of growing up in this day and age weren’t enough, imagine having to cope in the midst of budding relationships with vampires.  Gripping plotlines ensue as we join the main characters in navigating such pitfalls as: being allergic to the sun, being thirsty for blood, and, of course, being evil.  Ah, them teenage years.

My cursory research reveals that we have eight series of this show to enjoy, but I really don’t think for a minute I got too far past season six.  Back in 2009, I probably made appointments to view the show at obscure hours on ITV2, but then I also recall various DVDs arriving on my Lovefilm subscription.  Sure, the initial premise of the opening series was gripping.  High-schooler Elena falls for handsome classmate Stefan Salvatore, only to find out he’s a vampire.  We’ve all done it, right?  Luckily, he has a conscience to balance out his murderous tendencies, but his cheeky brother, our Damon (played by a chap who was offed in the first series of Lost), is not burdened by such inconveniences.  His every crack is so wise that his dialogue eventually makes your skin crawl.  And wait, both brothers are so handsome that even after they’ve murdered you, you’ll still get lost in their eyes.  I assume the high school purged all of its students with below average looks in a public burning.  You can’t blame them.  Each episode seemed to culminate in an event in the beleaguered town of Mystic Falls (should have guessed, really) a bit like The OC, only the tension came not from social faux pas caused by the intermingling of the classes, but from the unleashing of bloody hell when some demon or rascal attacks the town and, mostly, the school.

Of course, to give the whole thing legs, the vampires were soon joined by other creatures.  Elena’s bestie gets into witchcraft.  You’ve got some werewolves in there, some hunters, some original vampires (cue spinoff) and many more.  Buffy The Vampire Slayer, anyone?  But then, a few series in, we flesh out plot contrivance to a whole new level with the arrival of the doppelgängers.  Suddenly, we don’t know if we’re dealing with lovely Elena, or Katherine, her naughty naughty twin.  Then we start swapping back and forth between which brother has a conscience and which brother is evil.  The plots wind themselves up more tightly until all the cast can do is frown in order to understand them.  As with Teen Wolf, complexity is mistaken for intrigue and the sheer volume of storyline becomes overwhelming.  And I don’t remember seeing a diary at any point beyond the first few episodes either, but Elena must have had her hands full diddling about with both brothers.  So I dialled out.

That’s not to say I don’t regret my decision.  This was a sexy show and, for a time, it filled an inexplicable need of mine to be consuming some sort of vampire content.  But ain’t nobody got time for plots that tie themselves in too many knots.  The Vampire Diaries only finished in early 2017 and who knows how it ended.  Maybe the doppelgängers got their own twins and inflicted triplegängers on a confused audience (this happened) or the leading lady was absent for whole series (this also happened).  Either way, I still have unrealistic expectations that vampires will enter my day-to-day life.  I’ll keep a beady eye out at the office for sure, but chances are it will be too busy casting withering glances at my Christmas-enjoying colleagues to spot the real bloodsuckers.

The OC

Californiaaa.

Califooorniaaa.

Here we coooooome.

I think we’re all guilty of screeching these lyrics at some point during a night out.  Invariably, it’s gone midnight.  People’s standards have dropped, responding to overplayed cheese music with raucous cheers and conflating jumping up and down out of time with dancing.  On comes one of the pitchiest theme songs we’ve ever known and suddenly we’re all guilty of the delusion we can reach and sustain those big notes as sung out by Phantom Planet.  I’ve come close to asphyxiation several times, but it’s worth it for that brief sentiment that I’m some sort of Californian teenager, rather than an adult who should know better, trying to relive their university heyday, spending my Student Loan in Oxford’s The Bridge nightclub.

That’s right: this week, we’re doing The OC.  Why?  Why not!?  Also, I haven’t finished anything new in a while and you readers seem to lap up the nostalgia.  Reminding people about when they were young is some of the biggest clickbait the internet was invented for.  You’re not eighteen anymore, but let’s see if I can’t remind you just how many possibilities lay ahead of you then by taking up a thousand words or so of your time now.  But, the first thing I want to point out is our ridiculous obsession with California in the first place.  I didn’t grow up there.  My Orange County was Mole Valley; my California was Surrey.  A teen show called The MV (which we never even called our district at the time) with a theme tune that involves belting out the word Surrey repeatedly would just never had had the same global appeal.

But what was it about The OC that drove us so wild in 2003?  It wasn’t even on at a convenient time.  It appeared in the T4 schedule, thrown to by a smug Steve Jones and an even smugger Miquita Oliver (love them both), at something like 11.15am on a Sunday.  These were the days before setting the Sky Plus, so you had to make sure you knew where to be on a Sunday morning.  TVs were hard to come by in my student days (having already alluded to the TV room situation in my Desperate Housewives post) but one of us did have a teeny tiny 14 incher in their room.  Up to 20 of us would clamber onto any available service for an overpopulated group viewing, unable to make out what was happening onscreen and deafened to any of the dialogue by constant chatter and subsequent shushing as we reacted wildly to anything we did happen to follow.  Ah, such good times, then.

At the show’s heart were the Cohen family, whose wealth was matched only by their do-goodishness.  Patriarch, Sandy, summoned power from his enormous eyebrows, saying the words “pro bono” over and over until they were nothing but a euphemism.  His wife, Kirsten (which sounds abhorrent in an American accent and was therefore abbreviated to Kiki, which was just creepy instead) had different coloured highlights in her straightened hair and a wealthy dad off Neighbours.  Their awkward son, Seth, displayed his awkwardness by having his every line overwritten into banter, disguising the fact he was deeply annoying for many series.  I’m making everyone sound unlikeable, but this was over a decade ago and times were simpler.  We tolerated worse people in our Californian drama.

In the first episode, the Cohens adopt a lad from the wrong side of the tracks: enter Ryan Atwood, played by a forty-year-old (probably) but supposedly a school-age kid.  The OC didn’t care that your knowledge of LA neighbourhoods was limited: just by saying he was from Chino we had to understand that he was from bad stock.  Maybe Chino is like Croydon.  I don’t know.  Our bad boy tries to mix into wealthy society with mixed results, boosting Seth’s street cred, but also getting him into trouble.  Luckily, someone was on hand to say, “Welcome to the OC, bitch.”

Indeed, it was the bitches of The OC that became breakout stars.  We were all abuzz about the beauty and coolness of Marisa Cooper, but it was her sidekick Summer who had the best lines and an actual personality (even getting referenced in a Rizzle Kicks song years later).  Like Gossip Girl (with which the show shared some development), things ramped up around an event in each episode, typically spoiled in some way, often by Ryan’s wrong-side-of-the-tracksness.  The four seasons must have got repetitive, as I don’t remember finishing them all, but for an hour every Sunday morning, we could truly believe we were Californians.

When I finally went to California for the first time in 2014, I forced friends take me to the OC, even though my visit was already self-invited.  We sat on Laguna Beach and then had a fancy lunch.  I had a wee in the sea to mark the occasion.  Among my student pals, we all found different ways to express our obsession with the show.  One individual, editing the features section of one of our student newspapers, the Cherwell, would use Ryan Atwood as a pseudonym for the articles he wrote for his own pages.  I painstakingly downloaded the soundtracks from Kazaa, following the exact track-listing of each Mix in the series of Music From The OC, falling in love with songs like Dice by Finley Quaye & William Orbit, and Fortress by Pinback.  Maybe if I listened to the music hard enough, I would be a resident of Orange County too.

In conclusion: Californiaaa, there we went.  A show whose cast and storylines once seemed like the most important things in the world is now nothing more than a standard selection from a wedding DJ.  Relive your youth and watch it again.  Root for Seth getting a date with Summer.  Root for Ryan to overcome the prejudices suffered by a boy from Chino.  Root for yourself to find out what Chino is.  Root for Marisa’s mum’s lips to be slathered in so much lip gloss you can see your own reflection in them.  I haven’t done any of these things; I’ve just gathered some hazy recollections and then done a second-rate job of fact-checking them on Wikipedia.

So, let’s repeat to fade, now that we have run out of things to say:

Californiaaa.

Califoooorniaaa…

Gossip Girl

A lot of people have been asking me recently how I choose what to write about next.  And by a lot of people, I actually mean nobody – I’m just using an Instagram trope here.  Friends tend to look away sheepishly if I ever ask them directly about reading my blog.  If I wander over to a conversation about boxsets in the office, silence suddenly descends as people fear I’ll try and promote my writing and opinions.  Sure, everyone wants to tell me what to review, so now I’ve got a list of shows I’ll never get through, but then people only read if they like the programme I’m rinsing.  But no, each one of these is a gem, so please read them all.  If you don’t like the show, there’s enough rambling about me as a person to counter that.  And this week is no different.

Currently bogged down in some big old boxsets, I’m raiding the archives again.  Two things have brought Gossip Girl to the top of the list.  One is the return of colder weather to London after the inhumanity of July’s heatwave.  As a sweaty adult, I couldn’t be happier.  Winter is coming, and everyone knows back to school is the best time of year.  You can get a new pencil case, some fresh pens, and you’re another year up in school, which increases teenage coolness no end.  However, I’m thirty-three and I work in an office.  Rather than returning from the summer hols reinvented, I’ve not been off since April (though that was for a trip to Japan, so, you know…) and we don’t have pencil cases at work due to the clear desk policy and the replacement of pen and paper by laptops.  But no, it’s colder and I love it.  And if there was ever a show for giving you winter coat inspiration, just take a look at any episode of Gossip Girl.  Every character, even those on supposedly limited incomes, has an endless supply of on-fleek winterwear.  This might give you some pointers on the quality of Gossip Girl’s drama, the fact that coats are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the show.

The second reason is that I recently passed the ten-year mark in the job I so freely berate in these posts.  In June 2008, at my final interview, I talked about Gossip Girl in answer to an important question.  In those days, the department I was entering mostly only did TV sponsorships.  My two interviewers were asking me which I had seen on telly myself.  Let’s set the scene.  I had cycled across a boiling London from my hellish old job, so I was sweaty (recurring theme) and dishevelled, with uncontrollable helmet hair.  I also had an eye infection, thanks to the effect of general London dirt on my Home Counties eyes.  So my contact lenses had been abandoned for the NHS specs I only wear behind closed doors.  On the thirteenth floor of a Holborn office block, the sun was shining directly in my face, optimising the sweat-fest conditions so much so that I had to rub the perspiration repeatedly from my clammy forehead.  Don’t worry, I totally got the job obviously, and my new colleagues later told me they got a Harry Potter vibe from me due to all the conditions of my appearance I have just described.

So what TV sponsorship should they realistically expect a twenty-three-year-old lad to talk about?  Maybe some sort of football or other ball sport?  No, I was happy to make a banging first impression by talking about Gossip Girl.  If you’re going to enjoy TV aimed at teenage girls, you might as well get that out in the open as a first step.  In those days, a combination of graduate poverty and historic media technology meant that TV could only be consumed as per the TV guide.  ITV2 seemed only to schedule Gossip Girl at 10.35pm every third Thursday as long as the moon was blue and pigs were flying.  Didn’t stop me though.  I never missed an episode, complete with Guerlain sponsorship idents for a sickly-sweet perfume aimed at teenage girls (like me) with olfactory challenges (not like me).  Cue me bossing the question with epic insights into why the brand and the programme were the perfect convergent fit.  Cue my future employers hiring me because I reminded them of Harry Potter.

After 750 words, then, I should probably tell you what the show is about.  The premise focuses on an exclusive Manhattan school for wealthy kids.  Enter via bridge or tunnel Dan Humphrey, a scholarship-endowed chap with curious side-burns, played by an actor named after a brand of tennis ball (Penn Badgley).  His crush on Serena van der Woodsen (a charmingly ingenue Blake Lively, but with a chequered past when it suited the plot) generated the tension of the first series, if I remember rightly, but luckily this was all stretched out for six series of 121 episodes.  Little bit of Mean Girls, little bit of Cruel Intentions, little bit of anything that’s ever been set in New York: this was Gossip Girl.

Well, that was the whole point: which of the main characters was actually Gossip Girl?  I never finished watching the show, so I don’t really know myself.  It doesn’t matter as I can’t be sure I ever understood what this concept was supposed to be anyway.  These were the days before smartphones and 4G.  Using the internet away from your ethernet cable was limited to noticing your ancient mobile had accidentally switched on WAP and imagining an extortionate bill on your Orange tariff.  This didn’t stop Blair Waldorf or Chuck Bass in their conniving ways, using this nebulous platform to drop dirt on friends and frenemies alike, setting us viewers up for a roller coaster of crossing, double crossing and back crossing until seeing the end credits came as a welcome release.  Each instalment would culminate in some sort of catered event: a birthday party, some welcome drinks, basically anything.  In the run up, boyfriends and girlfriends would need to betray each other in the best interests of each other (I think), resulting in a climactic unearthing of the truth on Gossip Girl, heralded by simultaneous mobile bleeping as the blast came through and the action kicked off.  I say action, but the boys were restricted to conveying emotion through smoulder only, and the girls similarly limited to pouting, so the whole thing resulted in the kind of face porn that makes you disappointed to leave the comfort of your own home and see an ugly person.  Or there might have been one in the actual house with you, which was all the more shocking due to its proximity to Nate Archibald or Vanessa Abrams.

In 2012, Gossip Girl bid us XOXO for the last time, inspiring a Beyoncé classic, but leaving a glamorous teen drama-shaped hole in all of our viewing lives.  I’m none the wiser about who ended up with whom, but the Upper East Side must be awash with genetically blessed babies by now.  A reboot wouldn’t know what to do with itself.  Gossip Girl would have to go multi-platform, with accounts on SnapChat, Tinder, Insta and probably LinkedIn.  I just hope Dorota is on more than minimum wage and that Eric van der Woodsen no longer has a centre parting.  So, to all those a lot of people who have been asking me what’s getting covered next, just chill out and keep reading yeah?  At the rate this thing is growing, you’ll be able to claim early adopter status by 2020.