Selfie Series Premiere Review: Poor Title, Possibly Okay Premise
When ABC first announced that it had ordered a pilot called Selfie, I rolled my eyes so hard that I fell over. I think I even felt a little piece of my soul turn black and die, as if it was a Horcrux that Harry Potter had stabbed with a basilisk fang. After all, my hatred for the word "selfie" is rivaled only by my dislike for the actual thing. It seems that my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds are constantly clogged by arm's-length photos of my friends, family, and the cast of Teen Wolf, and maybe I have the temperament of a 65-year-old man (which I don't think would surprise anyone), but that's not what I want to see when I log in to social media (I want to see snarky one-liners and videos of baby farm animals). Wait, don't go! Hear me out! The reason I'm telling you all this isn't that I think you care about my internet habits, it's so that you'll believe me when I say that, buried somewhere beneath Selfie's superficial surface is a story with potential.
A couple months ago, series creator Emily Kapnek—who also created the late ABC comedy Suburgatory—told reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour that she chose the title Selfie because "it speaks to the disease that Eliza has, in that she's consumed by this world." And while it's likely that I'll never come around on the title, the pilot itself at least showed promise once it removed its too-thick makeup and allowed its real story to shine. Hey, that's just like what happened to Selfie's heroine, Eliza Dooley (Karen Gillan)!
Gillan's Eliza is a self-obsessed American who, after suffering a humiliating public breakdown on a flight full of her co-workers, asks Henry (John Cho), the new marketing genius at her pharmaceutical company, to help her rebrand herself. The show is loosely based based on My Fair Lady and Pygmalion, and the Eliza we meet at the outset of the pilot thinks being friended is the same thing as having friends, and that happiness stems from the instant gratification of someone liking one of her photos on Instagram. She's self-centered to the point that she doesn't even know how to have conversations with people in real life (or IRL, as Eliza would say), quickly dismissing their stories as boring before launching into another one of her own. She almost always has a cell phone in hand, and has little to no tact. She's basically the living, breathing embodiment of everything Kapnek thinks is wrong with our internet-obsessed culture, and it's clear that Kapnek wants to showcase that behavior as a means of calling us all out for sometimes spending so much time online that we forget how to behave like actual human beings.
However, I'm concerned that Selfie might never get to where it needs to be.
On Suburgatory, Kapnek was able to highlight similar societal flaws by uprooting Jane Levy's Tessa and dropping her into a heightened suburban reality of Chatswin. In the show's early episodes, Dallas and Dalia Royce were comparable to Eliza in that they were extremely exaggerated characters who prioritized material possessions above almost all else, they were prone to gossip, and they cared deeply about their image. As Suburgatory progressed, we were able to see how ridiculous Chatswin looked through Tessa's eyes, and over time, the Royces felt more and more "human," if you will. Meanwhile, the show was grounded by Tessa's relationship with her father, and thus was able to tell emotional stories alongside all the satire. I can imagine a similar trajectory for Selfie, though the show isn't quite there yet. Episode 1 made a nice effort to soften up both Eliza and Henry by the end of its 22-minute runtime, as Eliza enlisted the help of her neighbors to help her get ready for a wedding she was attending with Henry. But since Eliza and Henry are both starting out as fairly harsh characters, and neither one of them seems to have any existing close relationships, it's going to be at least a few episodes before we'll know whether Selfie can truly succeed on an emotional level.
If Kapnek can continue to scrub away at her characters' sharper angles while highlighting the faults that plague our superficial society, Selfie stands a chance of becoming more than just a punchline. But it's got a lot of work to do. Gillan and Cho are quite charming in their roles, and I think part of the reason the show has any life at all is due to the chemistry they share, but the story needs to support them, too. Right now they're all that's holding Selfie together, and that doesn't make for a very solid foundation. But I'm willing to stick around to find out whether the series can strike the right balance between humor and emotion. I'm not saying Selfie and I will ever really be friends, but maybe we can be acquaintances who check each other's feeds from time to time.
NOTES
– If this is your first introduction to the talents of Karen Gillan—she also starred on Doctor Who for two and a half seasons, and she later shaved her head for her role as Nebula in this summer's Guardians of the Galaxy—I should point out that she's actually Scottish. And while her American accent (which she said she perfected after visiting SoulCycle in LA) isn't awful, I do think Eliza would be a lot more likable if Gillan had been able to use her natural accent. However, that might be exactly why Kapnek and the rest of Selfie's producers thought it was a bad idea. For what it's worth, Kapnek has said that the American accent was necessary to sell the real essence of Eliza's character, and I understand that on some level, so I'll allow it.
