High school fucking sucked right? It’s a dense jungle of stupid cliques and meaningless politics. The teachers are a menagerie of failed novelists, scientists and artists desperately trying to hold onto their shattered dreams as they teach hundreds of dead eyes. The guidance counselor is always trying to mold you into a conformist drone and the cafeteria smells like a mixture of bad tacos and bargain basement fish sticks. The angst springs eternal.
MTV’s latest reality show, My Life as Liz thrives on this angst. The show follows Liz Lee, a red-headed, horn-rimmed glasses wearing ball of Juno-inspired sarcasm. She lives in a dead end town in Texas, where she rages against her high school machine. The quips are clever and quick. Her posse consists of fat nerds with semi-adorable emo bangs.
Lee’s sworn enemy is Cori Cooper, a blonde cheerleader type with her own posse of plastics. The show helpfully tells the audience they are evil with a shot of them walking in slow motion. The slow motion implies doom, or something.
Anyway, Liz used to be a member of this awful clique until she realized just how futile it all was. So she took off her designer clothes, put on the glasses and started hanging out with the Magic the Gathering crowd.
Even though Lee claims that she is over the shallowness of her former best friends, this does not stop her from cattily commenting on everything they do. She’s over it, but she’s clearly not. The plot of the pilot episode has been told by almost every single teenage vehicle. It’s Valentine’s Day, and Liz’s school is selling carnations. Liz is totally cynical and stuff, but to her surprise she receives a bouquet of carnations from a secret admirer. She keeps her guard up, but decides to go to the Valentine’s Day dance to see who it is. When she gets there, she finds out that the whole thing was just a prank concocted by Cori Cooper and her minions.
Since Liz is the protagonist, the audience is supposed to be on her side. However, what makes Liz so different from her sworn enemies? My Life as Liz is clearly modeled after Daria, one of the last great MTV shows. However, Daria Morgandorffer’s was able to let her cynical guard down, and she was never vengeful. Lee is basically a poor man’s Juno…and that’s so 2007.
I would have loved this show as a teenager because I completely bought into John Hughes’ vision of high school. When you get older, you realize that the Breakfast Club is complete bullshit. Yes, it’s tempting to root for the outsider, but sometimes they are just as bad as the kids they claim to hate.