I just finished watching the series premiere of "Life Unexpected" which will be airing Monday nights on the CW at 9 p.m. (hopefully) for the next few months...not only did I like it, it made me tear up at the end and feel all warm and toasty inside...The promos keep calling it "Juno meets the Gilmore Girls."
The show centers around "Lux," a 15-year-old (almost 16, she insists!) trying to find her birth parents so she can get her emancipation papers signed and escape the horrors she has found living in foster care. Britt Robertson, the actress playing the spirited teenage girl, has the tricky job of balancing street smarts and world weary soul with a perkiness that keeps her from being a hardened downer...definitely "Juno" material:)
It is a testament to both the writers and actors that what might otherwise be a hokey show with too many convenient plot devices actually has a lot of heart and soul to it. Shiri Appleby and Kristoffer Polaha are quite convincing as two 30somethings who never really managed to grow up. "You both can't be parents, you both need parents!" Lux says to them at one point in the episode shortly after she has met them for the first time.
And the music selection is great, too...or at least the three songs featured in the first episode, one of them being the lovely and vulnerable "First Day of My Life" by Bright Eyes.
The New York Times reviewed it yesterday, though I don't think they liked it as much as I did:)
Here's the review:
Television Review | 'Life Unexpected'
Wise Teenager, Unpromising Parents
By MIKE HALE
The CW network, with its interchangeable casts and its New Mexico-size audiences (current population: around 2 million), is often dismissed as the kid’s table of prime time. It’s not a bad place to sit, though: with “Gossip Girl,” “The Vampire Diaries” and “Supernatural” representing 30 percent of its nighttime schedule, CW has as high a percentage of purely enjoyable programming as any broadcast network.
It’s too early to tell whether “Life Unexpected,” beginning Monday night, will increase that ratio. CW shows tend to walk a thin line between escapism and soap opera, and after its witty pilot the show spends Episodes 2 and 3 massaging the tear ducts, hard.
But there is the potential for something at least as good as “Gilmore Girls,” to which “Life Unexpected” will be compared. The film “Juno” is another reference point, as are earlier shows like “Party of Five” and “My So-Called Life,” though “Unexpected” at its best is lighter and jokier than those forerunners.
The pilot sets up the situation with record speed. In six and a half minutes of screen time, 15-year-old Lux (Britt Robertson), a product of a one-night stand who has spent her life bouncing around the foster-care system in Portland, Ore., tracks down her birth parents and figures them out. Foster care is “Scope-drinking moms and creepy dads that try to hit on me,” but Lux’s parents are unpromising in their own ways: her dad, Baze (Kristoffer Polaha), is an overgrown adolescent with no sense of responsibility, and her mom, Cate (Shiri Appleby), is a jittery commitment-phobe with no visible maternal instinct.
It shouldn’t matter, because all that Lux needs them to do is sign the paperwork for her emancipation hearing. But faster than you can say unlikely plot contrivance, she has been remanded into their shared custody, where, over the course of 13 episodes, she can move back and forth between rebellion and grudging respect.
The “Juno” comparison is double edged: Lux is the wise child, taking her life in her own hands. (“You can’t be parents,” she tells Cate and Baze, “you both need parents.”) But instead of facing an unexpected pregnancy she’s the product of one. She’s Juno’s baby grown up, if that baby’s life had gone haywire early on. Cate thought Lux would be adopted, but it didn’t happen; Baze never knew that she had been born.
Unconventional families and arrested development (“Some of us peak in high school,” Baze whines, expressing the fears of a generation) aren’t the freshest subjects. And with its plaintive pop music and standard-issue CW stars — Ms. Appleby could be the older sister of both Nina Dobrev from “The Vampire Diaries” and Mischa Barton from “The Beautiful Life” — “Life Unexpected” could pretty easily settle into the network’s formulas.
The first episode avoids that with sharp writing and appealing performances, particularly from Mr. Polaha. (He was the shop-teacher love object on the short-lived Judy Greer series “Miss Guided” two seasons ago.) Baze, who lives above the bar he rents from his father, sums up his life by saying, “My dad said do what I love, and I love to drink for free.”
The show has fun with Baze and his high school pals, and with the wary relationship between Cate and Baze, who fall back in lust as soon as Lux reunites them. It doesn’t quite know what to do with Lux, however, and Ms. Robertson has to spend too much time being either primly disapproving or anguished. The subsequent episodes try to introduce complications for her — street-kid friends on one side, scheming grandparents on the other — in contrived story lines that drag the show toward melodrama.
CW thinks enough of “Life Unexpected” to put it in the Monday night slot usually occupied by “Gossip Girl,” so it’s likely that we’ll get to see all 13 episodes. Whether we see more may depend on whether the writers can readjust the balance between humor and heartache.
LIFE UNEXPECTED
CW, Monday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Liz Tigelaar, Janet Leahy and Gary Fleder, executive producers. Produced by Mojo Films in association with CBS Television Studios and Warner Brothers Television.
WITH: Britt Robertson (Lux), Shiri Appleby (Cate Cassidy), Kristoffer Polaha (Nate Bazile, a k a Baze), Austin Basis (Math), Reggie Austin (Jamie) and Kerr Smith (Ryan Thomas).
