Sadie And Matty: Non-Carnal Soul Twins

The Awkward. dichotomy: overly engineered Juno-esque slang coinages draped on (or, sometimes, smothering) remarkably thoughtful plotting for a teen show. The pleasant surprise of how mature producers assume their audience is -- or, the maturity producers are trying to encourage the audience to shoot for -- has been evident since the series premiere, which diverged from the Degrassis of our age by starting with a couple of teenagers having consensual, mutually satisfying sex.

...Okay, granted, the whole rest of the first season ended up dramatizing the terrible outcome of that pairing -- Jenna (Ashley Rickards) hoping for a real relationship, and Matty (Beau Mirchoff) signalling that she was just his moped, but still -- at least viewers could discern that this was the sort of show that wasn't going to put itself into contortions to stay on the Family Research Council's good side. Now that the show is in its third season, and Matty and Jenna's relationship has -- for now -- turned functional and public, producers are exploring another relationship seldom covered in teen-targeted TV: opposite-sex platonic friendship.

The way Matty and Sadie (Molly Tarlov) have become friends is, of course, a bit conventional: she let him vent to her when he was on the outs with Jenna in order to get face time with him because she had a crush on him herself; they have also shared a drunken kiss, which is typical high school too. But now that she's in the process of losing her Queen Bitch status at Palos Verdes due to financial misadventure on her father's part, drug addiction on her mother's, and the widespread suspicion that she killed Ricky Schwartz (Matthew Fahey), Sadie is vulnerable in a way we've never seen her. All her female "friends" are more like minions who, having lost their fear of her, have pretty much peeled off at this point, meaning that her actual friendship with Matty is going to be more important to Sadie than ever.

Here's where some might make the argument that Matty is so idealized that one might assume Palos Verdes is part of the greater Utopia area. When one looks back on one's high school experience from a distance of a couple of decades, it may be hard to remember any guys who, at that time, were very popular, super-nice, legitimately fun, and staggeringly attractive (and, um, I am not prepared to admit how much longer than normal it took me to write this post due to the fact that my eyes kept wandering back to Beau Mirchoff's face in the graphic above until I just finally scrolled up to obscure it and YES I know he was born in 1989 but...in January! So he's not that young!) (I know he is). Furthermore, since Sadie is, at a size, let's say, 8, supposedly the chubbiest girl at PV, it may seem even less plausible that chiseled Adonis Matty would pay her any attention at all. But somehow, the show's producers -- and Mirchoff's good instincts as a performer -- have made Matty's core decency believable. The entire second season, in fact, seems to have been calculated to show us how Jenna's dating Jake (Brett Davern) kind of humbled Matty and let him grow up from being the kind of guy who, in Season 1, would think he was entitled to a secret side piece. For him to see the mighty Sadie humbled would, therefore, have particular resonance for him.

This being TV, it seems obvious that Jenna and Matty's happiness won't last; a hint at what might eventually break them up was offered in the Season 2 closer, as Matty held Jenna back from dancing at a party, the way her mother (Nikki DeLoach) had told Jenna her seemingly perfect high school boyfriend had stopped her from doing things she liked. So it's more than possible that Sadie and Matty's friendship is partly a setup for their eventual hookup. But for now, I like that Sadie has someone to call in her moments of desperation, and that Matty isn't blowing her off because he has a girlfriend now or because Sadie is a social pariah. And as long as she has at least one person to depend on, Sadie won't be forced to drop all her defenses and turn nice. The show would be unwatchably dull if it didn't have at least one truth-telling C stirring shit up. You're welcome.