(Passing) Notes On A Scandal

Despite my frustration that a considerable portion of this third season of Awkward. has felt like treading water, as producers tried and frequently failed to manufacture drama from Jenna (Ashley Rickards) and Matty (Beau Mirchoff) and their happy, stable, hard-fought relationship, I was confident that it was going to end up somewhere interesting. Fortunately, lat night's finale proved me right...and made me sad.

I know it's weird to describe a high-school relationship as "hard-fought," but...it is! Season 1 was all about Jenna pining for Matty, even as she knew that they were not in the same high-school caste and that just because he had slept with her, it didn't mean he would ever consider her girlfriend material. Then Season 2 was about Jenna being in a relationship with Jake (Brett Davern) -- who was kind of boring and not as cute, but (more importantly) nice to Jenna and willing to acknowledge her publicly -- and Matty belatedly realizing he wanted her...well, not "back," because they were never really together; he wanted to fix what he'd screwed up, I suppose. When Matty and Jenna finally synced up their bad timing and paired up in the Season 2 finale, the season-ending cliffhanger of sorts came as Jenna noticed something about Matty that her mother Lacey (Nikki Deloach) had mentioned with regard to her own high-school boyfriend: holding her back from doing things she wanted to do, if he didn't. (In terms of dramatic heft, it wasn't quite as great as the Season 1 ending -- Jenna figuring out that the savagely critical letter that had defined her year had been written by Lacey -- but nothing ever could be.) But as Season 3 dawned, Matty's reticence to dance with Jenna at a party in the Season 2 finale was robbed of some of its portent when the subject of dancing came up again and Matty admitted that he couldn't dance. Maybe that was the issue? Not that Matty and Jenna don't have enough common ground to build a relationship on? And he did end the episode a dancing fool, so problem solved, right?

Except, ugh, the real snake in the garden of Matty and Jenna's Edenic happiness was Collin (Nolan Gerard Funk), a kid Jenna met in her Creative Writing class. And while the whole premise of Season 1 was that Matty was too popular to admit Jenna into his social sphere, Collin's problem is that he's too cool: he comes to Palos Hills from a richie-rich neighbourhood and has a bunch of fancy, sophisticated friends. And despite the fact that when Matty and Jenna attended one of these fancy parties, Matty fit in pretty well, Jenna still has a fixed image of Matty as a dopey jock, whereas Collin, with his aesthete pretensions and, most importantly, his admiration for her writing (slash appeal to her vanity), has increasingly appealed to Jenna as an intellectual soulmate.

It's not that Jenna's wrong in seeing fundamental differences between Matty and Collin. It's that she's interpreting the data wrong. With the benefit of my very advanced age (I am sixty-three years young), to me it seems like Jenna is overvaluing the superficial things she and Collin have in common -- an interest in art and photography she had apparently never evinced until she met him; a mutual love of her writing -- and undervaluing Matty's thoughtfulness and love, perhaps because she is not great at offering either of those things herself.

Producers may, I think, have tried to tip the scales in Jenna's favour a little by having Matty admit in an unguarded moment of frustration that, back around Season 1, he was embarrassed by his social association with her and her (seeming) suicide attempt, and that when she asked him about that, he lied. That's, uh, obviously supposed to sting -- but Matty's explanation rings true and doesn't feel unfair to her: because that was fucked-up of him, and he knows it and has BEEN knowing it, he's let her get away with a lot in their relationship. Pointing out that she never asked him how things are going with his parents, after he'd moved out of their house and then back in, is a reminder that Jenna is more than a little self-involved. As viewers, we tend to forgive this tendency in series protagonists because, you know, the shows are about them. But there have been times that Jenna hasn't been a great friend to Tamara (Jillian Rose Reed) and Ming (Jessica Lu); she definitely jerked Jake around when they were dating; and she's spent a lot of this season treating Matty like a sweet but annoying Golden Retriever. What she likes about Collin is how he reflects herself back to her -- and now that Matty's stopped doing that, we probably know how "TO BE CONTINUED..." is going to play itself out whenever the show returns. And given the way Jenna has mishandled things, if they do break up, I for one will feel that Matty can do better.

This seems like a condemnation of the show, but I actually admire producers' willingness to let Jenna be a bitch in the believable way teenagers can be: short-sighted, acting out a persecution complex, seduced by the glamour of the new. It seems clear that the appeal of Collin's cool-guy mystique will wear off quickly (the mere touch of his hand on her forearm will be a lot less electric once she's actually slept with him) (which seems inevitable), giving Jenna a chance to grow up a little and learn from her regrets (also inevitable) what is actually important in a relationship -- which is, after all, what both high schools and the TV dramas set in them are actually about.