Privileged: All About Friends And Family
By fred | October 8, 2008
(S01E05) While it might not be my favorite show of the genre, and to be honest not even my favorite one on Tuesdays (as I like Greek better), Privileged is nevertheless a pretty good show, and one much better than its lead-in will ever be. Last week’s episode was a bit of a disappointment to me, because while I knew the show could have some great things to offer, they weren’t really there.
Which is why I’m so happy to report that things got much better this week, for an episode that did address some of the main issues I have with the show, issues that are quite pivotal to how the characters work at that. To be quick, I think this was not just a really good episode, but also the best episode of the series so far.
This episode was all about friends and family (!), it was about the definition of those two things according to Megan, and according to the twins. More specifically, Rose, who seemed (to me) to have a somewhat more important role this week, and I sure hope this is a new trend that will last because Sage is a much less interesting character, coming from weaker writing and poor acting.
To Megan, family doesn’t mean much, she barely talk to anyone and she doesn’t care, because her family are the people she chose, her friends, like Charlie. Poor Charlie, the nice guy who’s always here to help & support Megan, but she keeps forgetting about him. This was really sad, because you wished he would have something better to do than just walk around and hope for something that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Which is why I was actually glad he figured it out this week, when Megan made her little speech about how good a friend he is, and nothing more than just that, a friend, (then soon called a dog by Sage…) Charlie realized that it wasn’t going to happen, Megan wasn’t thinking of him the way he hoped she would, and he had to move on. I’m not sure what it will mean for the future of the character, but I do hope he finally gets to do better things than, well, separating drunk 16 years old at some stupid pool party.
Once again Megan was pretty mean to her sister Lily, and Rose didn’t like that. Because to Rose, family – and more than family, your sister – is all that matters. Rose identifies herself with Megan, and she wants Megan and her sister to be in good terms and happy together, because she might also see them as a possible future for herself and Sage, for what sisters could become, and the idea of losing her sister is the worst thing that could happen to her, because she already lost her parents, and Sage is all she’s got left in the world now.
Megan and Lily have a past, a past we’ve never really been made aware of, and I’ve always felt this was a problem in that we couldn’t understand where the characters were coming from, we didn’t have the information to understand their motivations, which made it hard to root for either of them. But I think this actually paid off quite well during this episode, as this weakness was used by the writers.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Privileged
