When Verso publishes its coffee table history of the end of the 1990s, the liner-notes scribes may want to start with a compendium of the mawk-heroic hosannas with which our small-screen Ruskins have greeted the coming of Felicity over the past few weeks:
"An emotive tour de force ... bursting with honest sentiment." -- Ray Richmond, Variety
"A deeper humor, warmer but also more raw." -- Sarah Kerr, Slate
"Emotionally plausible and endearing." -- James Collins, Time
"Searing in its intensity." -- Orange Julius, Videaste
"A drama that is intense because it is real, every minute [in sharp contrast to a TV culture that] has rarely had the resolve, particularly in recent years, to wear its heart on its sleeve with a really good drama." -- Tim Goodman, the San Francisco Examiner
When TV critics smell blood in the water, we must be on the verge of a feeding frenzy. So here's predicting that before it's time to begin your holiday shopping, you'll have read several glossy-paged articles heralding the long-delayed arrival of the New Earnestness. Maybe you've read a few already, possibly accompanied by cover stories on the Goo Goo Dolls or Matchbox 20. Some enterprising feature writer may actually pinpoint Good Will Hunting as the moment when the last yelps of youth market snarkasm were buried under the lugubrious strains of Elliot Smith's dare-you-to-laugh dirge "Miss Misery."
And the best thing about it is that it will all seem true. We've already passed the goal of three cross-media items that make a trend piece. In film, the heroes of the historical diptych of Titanic and Saving Private Ryan were unironic, single-meaning guys -- the kind of solid souls this nation hasn't seen since whenever those movies were supposed to take place. In literature, the fact that Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets is actually a book was immediately understood to be secondary to its function as the fulfillment of David Foster Wallace's post-ironic dream. As for music, well, take your pick. Just believe you can fly.
And you can hardly blame the culturizers for wanting to find new Icons of integrity, antigens for the diseases breeding in the still-warm corpse of irony. And indeed, studies have shown that after a few quarter hours of exposure Paula Cole and Sarah McLachlan, no pathogens -- or much of anything else -- can survive. What is surprising, though, is how readily even the carriers of the dread disease seem to be responding to treatment. In their mezzanine round of softball interviews, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker now routinely speak of the "sincere heart" that beats under their nonanimated cartoons' thin skin. "As bizarre as it is," Parker told The New York Times, "there's this overlying sweetness to it all. Like: 'Hey, you know what? The world's all right.' And I think that's because Matt and I are really very happy and optimistic. It wouldn't work if we were really dark, coffee-drinking, leather-jacket-wearing guys. It would just be us making all these crass remarks about the world, and it would get old."
Well, we know a thing or two about drinking coffee and making crass remarks about the world, but we can't blame anybody for latching onto a winning concept. More important, Matt and Trey are TV people, and it's on the small screen that the writers of these New Earnestness stories will find most of their examples (not surprising, given that this is where they do the bulk of their reporting). They won't lack for evidence. Having spent several years up Dawson's Creek without a paddle, the networks seem to be catching up. Already this season, the CBS snoozefest Promised Land has made a rope of tears out of a teen coming-out story (to be teenaged and gay on TV is to possess superhuman emotional capabilities). The WB has responded in kind by refitting Sabrina the Teenage Witch's dippy congeniality to the three-eyes-blind dourness of Charmed, the supernatural Y-generation Charlie's Angels from implacable genius Aaron Spelling (minus that hella funny Salem the Cat).
Only a visionary like Spelling could have spotted the simple numerical reason why Tearjerk TV should be synonymous with Youth TV. Teenagers now comprise a larger population group than the baby boom generation that ruled the roost when Spelling pulled off The Mod Squad with a straight face. And since adolescence is something all true adults remember as a time of humorless, unrelieved suffering, the current importance of Being Earnest isn't so much a natural cycle as a labored effort to get 'n Sync with the youngsters. Back when MBA hipsters were trying to get wif da wisecracking layabouts of the fabled Generation X, the result was pure frustration. But who needs them when you've got a whole Woodstock Generation to sell to?
Success in the future may well go to those most proficient at connecting sincerity with its logical under-20 target demographic. Granted, Keri Russell's very neck muscles seem to radiate an earnestness worthy of Felicity's Flaubertian namesake, but she's already getting long in the tooth and had better move fast if she wants to join the Holmes/Gellar/Ullrich/Love Hewitt mafia currently remaking Hollywood in its own wrinkle-free image. That this group has the collective comedic talents of Charles de Gaulle is no accident. Earnestness is about more than just being bummed out; it's about the purity of youth. No wonder Riley Weston -- the 32-year-old writer, actress, and sometime Felicity guest star currently in hot water for being able to pass as a teen -- has been singled out for such abuse. In the new Woodstock generation, only Neve Campbell has the necessary gravitas to be the brown acid.
For those of an entrepreneurial bent, earnestness also offers something worth its weight in Backstreet Boys -- a pain-free way to talk to the young at their own level. Right now, Levi's Silvertab (TM) is running a series of youth-centric billboard ads featuring gobs of gibberish phrases like "Candissy," "todo tranquilo!" and "talismanik." Back when the Beatles were appearing on Ed Sullivan, Marshall McLuhan defined the following as a joke Young People liked to tell: "What's green and hums? An electric grape." And when Elvis was still a young King, Anthony Burgess envisioned youthspeak as the Joycean argot of Nadsat. This is the standard grown-up response to the forgotten mysteries of adolescence: "These kids are speaking some kind of kooky patois that only they understand!" By comparison to flying on that flippety-flop, the rhetoric of Earnestness is a breeze. Everybody hurts.
But it's at that level -- the level of rhetoric -- that we have reason to suspect this New Earnestness business will never get much beyond an ardent trendspotter's unfulfilled wish. Because sincerity isn't a convincing rhetorical flourish -- it's what you pull out when every other rhetorical device has failed. It's the kid who starts yelling "Cut it out!" after getting bested in the dozens.
More to the point, there are strong reasons to question whether this stuff is really appealing to the young and whether Felicity's viewers are actually young women or middle-aged men enamored of the show's underripe emotional current (and just-ripe star). You see, while we steer as clear from teenagers as possible, the ones we deal with on a daily basis (usually to chase them away from the entrance to our building) remind us less of the angsty but telegenic ingénues we know from TV than of the same sarcastic louts who terrified us when we were in high school. In fact, our empirical diagnosis suggests Earnestness as a trope may have a shorter half-life than Julia's marriage to Griffin. It won't be long before America gives up on this effort to get through to the kids and goes back to handling young people in the more time-honored way -- by locking them up and breaking their spirits. Almost as if on cue with that prophecy, Congress is now discussing proposals to bring back the draft. Now that would be a great, exceedingly Earnest way for the Woodstock-2K generation to stake its claim on history -- with induction-center riots and burned draft cards. And Felicity's almost got that hippie-hair thing going already.
