No matter what certain producers might argue in interviews, a TV series isn’t just a full-length movie, and it shouldn’t be. Each medium has its own strengths and requirements. But there are undoubtedly certain advantages that movies have and shows don’t.
For example: It’s one thing to wait for a rocky first act if you’re determined to watch an entire movie. It’s another thing to push through when you have to decide every half hour to keep watching. Boo bitchby Erin Ehrlich (crazy ex girlfriend) and Lauren Iungerich (on my block), suffers the misfortune of a discouraging start — and while it eventually evolves into something bitchy and heartfelt enough to be fun, those early episodes are a bad thing to stick around long enough to find out.
Boo bitch
It comes down to
Not as sharp as the title.
In any case, the premise is intriguing: Two socially invisible high school students decide to live their best lives, but a freak accident turns one of them into a literal ghost before they can really get started. Determined to “leave a legacy” with what little time she has left, Erika (Lana Condor) turns herself into the ultimate queen bee, with a new wardrobe, a growing social media following, a powerful enemy (Aparna Brielle’s Riley ) and a dreamboat boyfriend (Jake C. from Mason Versaw – one of the more solidly low-key jokes in the series is that all the coolest guys in school are called Jake). By her side almost every step of the way is Gia (Zoe Colletti), her bestie of a decade.
Unfortunately, the first few chapters of the limited series are rough, with a raspy tone that aspires to youthful irreverence à la mean girls or cheerfulness and reaches it only occasionally. (And yes, the datedness of those references is part of my point.) Despite the brash title, Boo bitch isn’t dirty enough to draw blood. So what we often end up with is a series of jokes with the cadence of snarky comedy — the smash cuts, the lightning-fast dialogue, the purposefully awkward beats of silence — without the sharp humor to back them up. A teenage girl pulling out a baby in the middle of a bubble bath party can be a super dark joke, or a really crazy one. Boo bitch only manages to steer it towards glib.
Meanwhile, the leading ladies, and the dynamics between them, begin to feel just as tense and artificial as everything else in the series. Both Erika and Gia are extremely tense, albeit in slightly different ways – Erika is prone to dramatic explanations and Gia to engine-mouth chatter. In a device too cute for half, they communicate with each other in elaborate acronyms that no human would ever use, spelled out for the public in the on-screen captions: “YBFOASSADFHIATT,” apparently stands for “Your Best Friend’s On A Sinking.” Ship And Quickly Drown Hashtag I Am The Titanic.”
The series begins to pick up around the middle of the eight-episode season, as fissures in the girls’ friendship spread to fissures and then fissures. Colletti’s never quite convincing performance of awkwardness takes on softer, sweeter layers as Gia counts on a new romance and the impending end of a friendship. But it’s Condor’s over-the-top feat of monstrous rights that really flips the switch. Made famous as a consummate sweetheart in Netflix’s To all the boys movies, she seems to enjoy the chance to play the bastard.
Condors Erika walks the school hallways in marabou-finish jackets, wrinkles her nose to look down through rhinestone sunglasses, makes a snotty gesture at those she considers to be under her attention and a sickly sweet coo at those she wants to manipulate. Boo bitch says nothing about the shallowness of social media and teen toxicity that hasn’t been said before and better elsewhere. But Condor’s luscious landscape chew makes the series most entertaining when it pushes Erika to deeper and deeper lows, encouraging us to cherish her spectacular comeuppance.
If so, the show’s tone changes so suddenly it could cause whiplash. That Boo bitch going sentimental isn’t necessarily surprising, but the fact that it works at all is testament to both Condor’s innate charisma and the superficiality of the scripts — it’s easier to accept or forgive a turnaround when it’s so gleeful is cartoonish.
Despite its supernatural twist, Boo bitch is not particularly concerned about mortality issues; the looming threat of permanent ascension is treated like an elevated version of high school graduation, after which even friends as close as Erika and Gia could venture into the unknown separately. There is, it turns out, something genuine and recognizable buried in everything Boo bitchare superficial exaggerations. If only it didn’t take so much work to dig it up.