My New Masochistic Habit – Watching “Felicity”
During one of my many doggy paddles through what is available on Netflix streaming, I ran across the show Felicity. I remembered watching it occasionally as a kid with my big sisters – curly haired chick is obsessed with one guy, eventually everyone on the show bangs every other character. Kinda like all shows. I didn’t remember us finding it annoying, like 7th Heaven, or gossip-worthy, like Dawson’s Creek, but mostly just kind of pitiable. It was the show we watched because it was between two shows we liked.
What would adult me think? After re-watching the pilot, I vowed not to continue. Felicity was just plain depressing. Her hair (which I remembered as being beautiful), lumbers behind her like a giant, frizzy, grey cloud. She wears nothing but baggy sweatshirts, and her only conflict in life is parents who kinda don’t want to pay for her to go to NYU because they want her to stay in California. Every episode she comes up with a bad idea, which results in horribly disgracing herself in front of her crush, Ben, who feels “flattered,” annoyed and mildly turned on.
It seems as if the producers were like, “Let’s create a character with absolutely no dignity … and set it in New York City!” The saddest thing about it is that so many girls are actually just like Felicity. Despite being painful to watch, it feels closer to real life than other 90s WB shows did.
I did a little “research” for this article (see: reading Wikipedia), and found out a couple satisfying nuggets of information. Under “controversies,” there are only 2: People didn’t like her haircut, and the writer of this show was a 32-year-old pretending to be 19. She passed off her husband as her “big brother,” and had a deal with Disney that collapsed after someone from Felicity looked up her social security number and found out she was 32. Now I see where the “tendency to get in embarrassing situations” part of the show comes from.
The other delicious factoid I found was that the show was created by J.J. Abrams. Because the creator of Felicity cannot conceivably also create one of T.V.’s “most intelligent dramas,” every rule of logic ever proves that Lost is indeed a sucky show. So ha!
Alienating Lost fans aside, I have continued to watch Felicity. It’s boring, and cringeworty, but there is something comforting about knowing that she will blandly stumble into awkward relationships with all the men on the show. This is the origin of the awkward girl’s hope that she will attract a normal man.