Woman in Crisis

The "quarter-life crisis," occurring a few years after graduation from college, is usually induced by a sense that all the work you put into your degree and the promises it held let you down: you are not making any discernible progress toward landing your dream job (or even a job that you don’t hate), you are drowning under student loan debt, your latest relationship was a flop while all of your friends are getting married and having babies, you’re withdrawing from your friends because you’re so depressed about the state of your life. This phenomenon seems to attack women much more than men—mostly because of the marriage and baby angle, but perhaps also because of this period’s frantic sense that if you debunk “go to college and get your Mrs.” mentality you really have rolled the dice.

This week’s episode of Privileged, November 11’s “All About Insecurities,” captures the confusion and pressure that comes with women’s mid-twenties really well. Megan (JoAnna Garcia), Yale journalism grad-turned-live-in-tutor, is visited by Caryn (Sarah Drew), currently employed as an assistant flunky at an elitist New York magazine that sounds an awful lot like The New York Review. The trip is meant to be a group commiseration session about their respective failures to launch, but Caryn gets a call on the very first night telling her that she’s been promoted to an assistant editor position. Megan then finds herself in that awful position of being happy for a friend but wondering why it couldn’t have been her: The mantra “The race is long and only with myself” doesn’t provide much solace. The reality is that Megan’s most recent project of writing the biography of her employer, cosmetics giant Laurel Limoges (Anne Archer), was pronounced DOA after she uncovered a terrible secret of Laurel’s. Laurel is now making her miserable, the girls have hired a publicist, Megan’s had a fall-out with childhood best friend Charlie (Michael Cassidy), her most recent relationship was a disaster, and she’s still on the outs with her sister. Juxtaposing these life parameters against Caryn’s phone conference with Pulitzer prize winning Michael Chabon, and it looks like Megan has escalated from crisis to nuclear meltdown.

The continuation of the series leaves no other option than for Megan to stay on in the baffling belief that she will somehow be able to write in Palm Beach, an option she sincerely believes more meaningful employment will somehow preclude. It’s a cheap sitcom solution, but in a lot of ways I like that writer Scott Weinger didn’t attempt to put a verbal band-aid on the situation. The drawn out sense of impending doom is the essence of the quarter-life crisis, which makes this “privileged” generation seem just slightly less so.

The show ends with Megan making out with her billionaire neighbor, Will Davis (Brian Hallisay), who used to date her sister Lily (Kristina Apgar). That should make her life less complicated.