ABC’s Selfie as the Victim of The Recent Failed Televisual Rom-Sitcom Experiment

Every television season it’s fun to watch the new hot televisual trend and see if it’s going to be a success or a flop.  This year the experiment was the rom-sitcom:  the hybrid genre that results when you try to blend the characteristics of the romantic comedy with that of the sitcom. 

In theory this merger appealed to me.  As a fan of the serial format, I find myself much more invested in characters and relationships that evolve over the time allotted from a long-lasting series in comparison to a two-hour filmic installation.  And, as a forever-flawed feminist, I am also oddly drawn to romantic comedies despite their predictable plots, stock characters, stereotypical gender portrayals, and unflinching endorsement of heteronormativity.  I was curious to see how this systematic combination would work on the small screen.  It didn’t take me long to realize it wouldn’t.  It didn’t take the networks long either.  Take for example the early cancelations of NBC’s Manhattan Love Story and CBS’s A to Z.

Manhattan Love Story followed the typical romantic comedy formula:  a meet cute that leads to seeming opposites falling into an unlikely courtship.  Following in the tradition of romantic comedies (like almost any film staring Katherine Heigl), the show featured a crass, womanizing male protagonist and an uptight, naïve female protagonist.  Bad acting and writing aside, I decided early on that while I can often stomach such problematic recurring characters for the duration of a 90-minute Hollywood film,  the idea of tuning in to watch such characterizations play out endlessly week after week in 30 minute intervals was not appealing.   

A to Z had a slightly more enjoyable premise. The opening voice over announces:  “Andrew and Zelda date for eight months, three weeks, five days, and one hour. This television program is the comprehensive account of their relationship.”  On the surface the show seemed to have a set-up that could replace that of the recently vacated How I Met Your Mother:  viewers are presented with a known end point that they are watching to arrive at but do not know what that end point actually is:  dating that ends in a break up or a marriage.  Despite being mildly interested in the premise, like many other viewers apparently, I didn’t tune in past the pilot episode.

In the midst of all these shows, I found myself drawn to only one new sitcom that debuted this season:  ABC’s Selfie.  While others grouped the show with these others in the category of rom-sitcom because it included a potential romantic pairing between the two leads (but what sitcom doesn’t do this usually?), I felt it was simply a new workplace sitcom carrying out some interesting social commentary.    The show starred Karen Gillan as Eliza Dooley, a social media obsessed, narcissistic fame junkie who ultimately seeks guidance for self-improvement from her colleague, Henry Higgs (played by John Cho), a marketing image guru.  Although necessarily hyperbolic, the show provided some over-the-top social commentary on our cultural addiction with technology and social networking.  Although played for laughs, the show transformed the real findings of researchers into little vignettes to allow viewers to ponder the impact of these trends on our lives.  For example, the show included storylines about how identity performance plays out in online spaces and how those carefully constructed projections lead to feelings of inadequacy and jealousy when people compare their real lives to those constructions.  It explored how social networking has resulted in the devaluing of real face-to-face friendships, replacing such practices with that of collecting of online friends as accessories and evidence of social capital.  It addressed how social media is changing the ways in which we start, maintain, and end relationships.  And it hinted at the concerns of living in an era wherein all of our movements are forever recorded in the ever expansive cloud.  

While it’s silliest (and perhaps funniest) moments came in the form of replaying the very real social media missteps that many viewers have experienced in real life (for example when Henry becomes addicted to cyber stalking his ex-girlfriends through Facebook and accidentally ends up tagging himself in a picture of one who was breastfeeding her newborn), the most heartfelt moments came when the show addressed the ways in which our ever-connected lifestyles actually lead to more loneliness than ever before.  (An issue well covered in scholarly endeavors, such as Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together:  Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other).  However, what I really enjoyed about the show is that it didn’t rest on the reductive premise that loneliness stems from this cultural phenomenon alone.  The show systematically juxtaposes scenes that highlight Eliza’s lack of interpersonal skills with those that showcase Henry’s (usually) unfaltering success in social situations.  But then it reveals that both are equally lonely.  The social networking addict and the social networking abstainer both are lacking in meaningful friendships and romantic relationships, although they start to gain both through their encounters with one another.  My favorite moment from the series was the scene in which Henry – who is tasked with improving Eliza’s public image and poor social habits – abandons his goal of getting her to stop eating her lunch standing over the garbage can once she reveals that it was an old habit developed to make it seem like she was too busy to sit down and eat when really it was because as a young girl she had no friends to sit down and eat beside.  Learning this, Henry instead joins her to eat his own lunch standing beside her over a garbage can in his office.  I liked the inclusion of this theme of loneliness in the show as it showed that this emotion is a time honored experience common to human experience… and not just to humans participating in the social networking era.  This little motif added a little nuance to a show that could be read as beating us over the head with jokes about our technology addiction and social communication practices.

But maybe the jokes seemed too overdone and they over-powered what I thought to be great acting and pretty good chemistry between Gillan and Cho.  Or maybe Selfie’s downfall was being grouped with the aforementioned sitcoms as being just another of the over-done romantic comedy shows that debuted this Fall.  Perhaps if it has debuted without the others the series would not have found itself arriving at the same destination:  cancelation.

But, maybe it would have.  Maybe viewers aren’t interested in a show that gets them to think critically about their most common social practices.  Maybe some of the jokes hit too close to home.