By: Alex Tilton

This review took a while because it turned out to be hard to categorize this show, and hard to review it without diving into a full-length recap of the main character arcs.

SLCG is a comedy by Mindy Kayling, who got her big break on The Office and subsequently had her own show for six seasons. SLCG itself ran on HBO for 3 seasons before getting canceled. We discovered it, as we have with many shows, while scrolling through the MAX menu looking for something to watch. Spoilers ahead.

The show takes place at a fictional private college in Vermont called Essex. The main characters are Leighton (a spoiled, wealthy, elitest, condescending, closeted lesbian), Bella (an Indian girl who is obsessed with becoming a comedy writer), Whitney (a star soccer player and daughter of a senator), and Kim, the ordinary one of the group. Her parents manage a drugstore in the southwest, she’s attending Essex on a scholarship and doesn’t know what she wants to do.

Let’s start with the good. The characters are very well written, have a very believable feel to them, and they’re extremely funny. Their story arcs are fun to watch, well plotted out, and give the audience a good feeling of resolution (sometimes). The acting is excellent. All of the technical aspects are done extremely well. The show is overall excellent and you should watch it.

Now for the bad. As much as I liked the character arcs this college campus doesn’t feel like a real place. Everything is neat and clean, except when it can’t be because the plot needs it to be messy. Everyone is completely, totally progressive in their social attitudes except when they can’t be because the plot needs them to be bigoted. Solutions to problems typically don’t blow up in anyone’s face. The only thing this show requires of its characters is that they make the effort to do the right thing…eventually.

Bad decisions do come back to haunt the characters later, but there aren’t generally any long-lasting consequences. Plot arcs follow this formula: “Oops…I did an impulsive, immature, bad thing. Here’s my plan to fix it…yay, the plan worked!”

I get that this is a feel-good comedy and you don’t want your audience dwelling on bad stuff, but hand-waving problematic events can make it hard to take the show seriously. For example, the resolution to a plot where Whitney (a legal adult) knowingly has an affair with her married assistant soccer coach: the entire coaching staff gets fired, everyone finds out everything, and none of the team are angry at Whitney. In principle, this is a perfect reaction from the team. She did something tremendously stupid, but the coach had the responsibility to be the adult, which he didn’t do. But in any real school, her teammates would’ve had her head on a pike.

Leighton’s arc revolves around coming out as a lesbian. Her spoiled-brat behavior is understood to at least partially stem from the stress of concealing her identity. She’s motivated to come out after she gets dumped by a girl who doesn’t want to date anyone who is closeted. And when she does, everyone is completely and totally cool with it. Then she immediately reverts back to her spoiled, elitest self and starts sleeping with any girl she can find. This blows up in her face when she gets an STD and has to go around telling her partners to get tested. She has a second arc where she finally gets sick of trying to be an ‘it girl’, and decides to pursue a career in mathematics at MIT, which necessitates writing her off the show. She’s replaced by a character named Kayce who I would describe as ‘good but not good enough’. She simply didn’t have the same punch and entertainment value as Leighton and this probably had a lot to do with the show getting canceled.

Bella and Kimbery arcs are pretty good, but also lacking in long-term consequences. Bella is obsessed with becoming a comedy writer by way of joining an elite extracurricular campus group called the Catullan. She’s prepared to do anything to succeed, which irritates and harms a lot of people, and nearly causes her to fail out of school. She does learn something from all of this and tries to turn it around, but the show didn’t last long enough for this to really flesh itself out.

Kimberly’s character doesn’t have a ‘thing’ like the others do, and her arc is trying to find one. She makes the story interesting by having to deal with the fallout from some egregious mistakes along the way, but even by the end of the final season she’s still not sure who she wants to be. The others all at least think they know. This might make her the most grown-up of the whole lot, or it could have anyway. Like a lot of other things in this series, it never gets resolved. 

It’s not crazy to hope that this show gets resurrected on one of the other streaming services, but I wouldn’t hold my breath either. 

Image Source: IMDb.com