84 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
THE CRITICS
ON TELEVISION
THROWBACK THURSDAY
Hulu’s “High Fidelity” and Freeform’s “Party of Five.”
BY DOREEN ST. FÉLIX
ABOVE: SERGE BLOCH
H
alfway through the fourth ep
isode of the Hulu television se
ries “High Fidelity,” a new ad
aptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel,
Robin (Rob) Brooks, played by Zoë Kra
vitz, monologues to the camera as she
stomps, deadeyed and heartsick, down
a Brooklyn block to her local bodega. At
the counter, the doragged clerk, young
and brown, looks at her. “You’re wearing
lipstick,” he says. “No,” Rob scoffs, purs
ing her lips, which are conspicuously red.
We are to understand that Rob, the sulky
owner of the record store Championship
Vinyl, who is on her way to meet an ex,
a lesbian influencer named Kat, is more
eager to please than she’d like others to
believe. But, as the lighting softens and
the camera zooms in on Rob’s face, some
thing else has happened, too. The se
quence has become a luxury advertisement.
I’d seen Kravitz lit and her mouth
painted like that before, up and down
my Instagram feed, as the face of Y.S.L.
Beauty. Was this a plug? What matters
more is that it felt like one. “High Fidel
ity” is lookbook television—an accre
tion of interestingly composed set pieces
that are designed to have second lives as
moodboard fodder. Hornby’s book was
set in nineties London; Stephen Frears’s
2000 film adaptation moved the action
to Chicago. The television series was shot
in Brooklyn, and never has Greenpoint
or Crown Heights looked so dreamily
spruced. Brooklynite viewers could play
a drinking game called Spot the Bedford
Avenue Establishment.
Months before the trailer dropped,
shots of Kravitz on set were already
populating Instagram fan accounts. One
featured her sitting on a brownstone
stoop, eyes narrowed, wearing a pleated
schoolgirl skirt and an oversized Dickies
logo T—a riff on the Dickies shirt and
black pants worn by John Cusack as
Rob Gordon in the movie. On Cusack,
the clothes illustrated Rob’s avoidance
of style, which is its own mode of
selfpresentation; a wannabe counter
culturist, he compulsively catalogues
women the way he does his records. But
while Rob Gordon possesses a complete
world view, one contemptuously defined
in relation to the flow of the mainstream,
Rob Brooks does not—not yet, at least.
On Kravitz, the outfit is the uniform of
a streetstyle maven. She also wears tiny
sunglasses like his.
The new “High Fidelity,” like women
led reboots of other maleoriented fran
chises—“Ghostbusters” and “Ocean’s
Eight” come to mind—is less a reinven
tion than a reverential kind of drag show.
The “Ugly Betty” creators Sarah Kuc
serka and Veronica West spearheaded
the adaptation; Hornby is credited as an
executive producer and Scott Rosenberg,
who cowrote the film’s screenplay with
Cusack, is a producer and writer. Like
the movie, the show opens with a closeup
on Rob listing her top five heartbreaks
straight to the camera. (Where Cusack
seethed, Kravitz weeps.) Before she can
tell us who is responsible for the fifth,
the frame expands, and we meet him—
Mac (Kingsley BenAdir)—as he pre
pares to leave her apartment, for good.
Other scenes that mirror the film—Rob,
in the rain, yelling up to Kat’s apartment;
Rob having delightfully rude interac
tions with customers—similarly have
the feel of elaborate fan fiction.
In its staccato editing, and its occa
sional surreal turns—Debbie Harry makes
a fun appearance in one of Rob’s fanta
sies—“High Fidelity” sometimes resem
bles a pastiche of recent New York City
shows: “Girls,” “Ramy,” “Search Party,”
and Natasha Lyonne’s “Russian Doll.”
(Lyonne directs Episode 6 of “High Fi
delity.”) But, whereas in those shows the
city serves the plot, “High Fidelity” is too
simpatico with privileged Brooklyn bo
hemia to satirize it more than intermit
tently. Rob is notionally depressed; she
eats Indian takeout in the bathtub and
sleeps with a Scottish musician ten years
her junior. (His counterpart in the film
was Marie de Salle, played by Lisa Bonet,
Kravitz’s mother.) A smarter series would
have worked with Kravitz’s utter inability
to appear anything less than glamorous.
Instead, in Episode 7, Rob’s brother, Cam
eron (Rainbow Sun Francks), drunk and
coked out, taunts his sister, who’s wearing
a vintage Boy Scout shirt: “You’re dressed
like a little boy!” As if all the hot girls in
Brooklyn weren’t dressed like little boys.
At Championship Vinyl, Rob’s co
workers, Simon and Cherise, watch, be
mused, as she embarks on a quest of
tracking down her exes, to understand
why they rejected her. I became invested
in the finely sketched relationship be
tween Rob and Mac; through its dissolu
tion, we get a believable portrait of Rob’s
cowardice. The other breakups, explained
through hectic flashbacks, were less com
pelling. Still, I remained curious about
the satirical possibilities of “High Fidel
ity,” the question of what it might mean
for a young woman to define herself as
a harridan who rails against pop culture.
Which phenomena would she endorse,
and which would repulse her? Would
