James the Pretender

I finished watching the first season of this show and thought I would share some positives and negatives. Possible spoilers to follow. Positives: The acting is good. Most of the characters emoted well and interacted well with each other. The actress that plays Georgia really sells the character's quirky and unassuming facade, while nailing the devious scheming moments as well. Negatives: Unfortunately, the actors very competently acted out an absolutely garbage script. The teen characters are grating caricatures of high school stereotypes but with some intersectional addendum that the writers emphasis more than the characters' personalities. Quirky drama girl, but lesbian. Overachieving smart kid, but half Taiwanese. New kid from a poor family out of their depth on a rich school, but biracial. The only stock model is the broody, bad-boy love interest. One of the two titular characters, Ginny, lies, cheats, makes racist and sexist comments, and blackmails people while justifying almost every terrible thing she does as being the result of the struggles of being biracial (and to a lesser extent because her mother is a criminal). Very few times, if any, does she even acknowledge that self agency and personal culpability are a thing. Characters go from whiny teenagers to preachy social justice warriors multiple times an episode. This leads to the somewhat infamous "Oppression Olympics" scene. If this scene was a commentary on the possibly self-destructive outcome of taking a progressive viewpoint to a ludicrous extreme, conveyed via parody, it could have worked well. But that isn't how the scene was written. The writers were dead serious, and it was just awful. Conclusion: I watched this show all the way to the end because I felt I needed to in order to judge it fairly. I regret that decision. By the end of the season, I hated pretty much every character to the extent I was rooting for the P.I. to have the mother arrested and the children sent to their respective other families so I would never have to see or hear them again. The only good thing I can take away from this experience is the delicious schadenfreude of seeing people trying to out-woke this garbage woke show by claiming that having white female writers try to showcase racism and sexism against minorities is racist and sexist. Unless you love teen angst, poor decision making, and intersectional politics, skip this one.