Let the Woman Speak!

Both networks that housed Buffy the Vampire Slayer have since collapsed under the weight of expensive sci-fi shows no one watched and teenage drivel that… well… no one watched. The CW Network, which rose from their ashes, hit a home run with Gossip Girl, which now seems to be providing the boiler plate for every show they intend to produce from now until someone pulls the plug.

Privileged is the CW’s latest of these attempts to make us see celebutantes as human beings worthy of our empathy. And I’ll admit, I was glad to see that Lucy Hale apparently survived the ill-fated Fox American Idol spin-off, American Juniors. The then fourteen year-old brunette, who was named to the show’s prize group for her (hopefully uncomprehending yet scarily suggestive) performance of Blondie’s “Call Me,” was the only member of the resulting group that anyone actually thought could sing. If Fox wasn’t going to deliver on their promise to make her a recording star (which they didn’t), they could at least not suck every last bit of life out of her, like they usually do to their washed up reality show contestants. Way to show uncharacteristic restraint, Fox!

Privileged follows the Gossip Girl template with minimal variation: Prada clad, platinum VISA toting trust-fund twins Rose (the aforementioned Lucy Hale), nice but clueless and spineless, and Sage (Ashley Newbrough), ill-tempered and manipulative, are simply a related version of Serena and Blair. Well-educated, well-meaning, and unwell-financed tutor Megan (Joanna Garcia), a Yale graduate who gets fired from her job as a tabloid journalist (ouch!) and is forced to take a position tutoring the twins in the hometown she fled years before, is a female, older version of Dan.

Like Gossip Girl, Privileged also takes its plot inspirations from teen health textbooks. This week’s episode, “All about Friends and Family,” aired on Tuesday, September 3, tackled pre-marital sex. Megan discovers a porn DVD in the collection the girls ordered in an attempt to avoid their reading list for English. Rose, not embarrassed in the least, says that she intends to use it to “brush up” on her “technique,” because she’s afraid she won’t measure up to the very experienced ex-girlfriend of Max (Andrew J. West), the flavor of the month. Megan confiscates the DVD on the pretext of wanting to talk to her about making smart decisions about who you open your legs for at the ripe old age of sixteen, then learns that Rose gave it up to a different boy entirely four months earlier. There’s a cut to Megan’s usually blank Powerbook screen, which this time bears the bold-faced title “Pornography Happens to Women,” and for a dizzying second it looks like the Yalie might get a chance to say something of meaning. Not on this show! The phone rings, it’s her boyfriend, and the very real ethical grey area surrounding women and pornography never rears its complicating head again.

Instead of hearing more about Megan’s desire to write about meaningful things, we’re distracted by her lack of sexual confidence. Or maybe it’s her sexual confidence and everyone else’s lack of sexual confidence, since she seems to be the only character on the show comfortable with saying when she is ready. Of course, that winds up being by the end of the show, after Rose has a convenient revelation that she isn’t required to have sex with Max just because she’s no longer a virgin. Hey—I’m not unreasonable! That’s an important revelation for teen girls to have. Way to go, Rose!

I haven’t read the book on which this series is based, How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls, written by Zoey Dean. But I’m going to hold onto hope that screenwriter Rina Mimoun can find a way to give Megan, far and away the most interesting character, a real voice, making her more than a sexier version of the voice-over at the end of an after-school special. They don’t have to resolve each issue in an hour. And frankly, the show would be better if they didn’t.