86 THE NEWYORKER, FEBRUARY 17 & 24, 2020
she dismiss Billie Eilish as conformist?
Is she too stuck up for Saweetie?
It’s difficult to know. In Rob’s mono-
logues, she speaks elegiacally of the thrill
of record hunting, but the show’s musi-
cal references are hardly obscure. The
music supervisors (and Questlove, who
was a consultant for the series) have Rob
listening to Lauryn Hill one minute,
David Bowie the next. In a scene set at
the Carlyle hotel, she chews out a fellow
record enthusiast, an older white man,
correcting him on the date of a Paul Mc-
Cartney & Wings album. The exchange
teases a sort of revanchist manifesto—
Rob Brooks upbraiding a Rob Gordon
type—and her companion, a nice white-
guy fling named Clyde ( Jake Lacy), eyes
her expectantly, as if begging for the raging
subtext to break the surface. It never does.
Curiously, “High Fidelity” is unfash-
ionably race-blind. It tends to launch
signifiers of racial awareness but backs
away from giving Rob a racial conscious-
ness. Recalling her tumultuous relation-
ship with Kat, she complains that Kat
preferred white girls. The fact that all but
one of Rob’s exes are white—and that
Mac, too, ends up engaged to a white
woman, who posts photos of frosé on
social media—is never explored. Some-
thing simmers between Cherise (Da’Vine
Joy Randolph, who deserves better than
her treacly arc) and Rob, the show’s only
two black women. At one point, after
Rob warns Cherise against “talking smack”
to her, Cherise retorts with an intriguingly
cutting barb. “ ‘Talking smack,’ Robin?”
she asks. “I bet you feel extra black today.”
The tension clearly springs from history,
personal and otherwise, but, once again,
the static instantly smooths.
I loved the eighth episode, “Simon’s
Top Five,” written by the comedian Sol-
omon Georgio, which takes its opening
scene from Episode 7, with Rob, Cherise,
and Simon closing up shop—and then
lets Simon (David H. Holmes) take over
the narration. Simon, we know, had been
responsible for one of Rob’s heartbreaks;
since coming out to her, he’s been her pla-
tonic supporter. He is his own man. “Want
to know about that knot in your heart,
the putrid taste in your mouth that leaves
you unable to speak?” he says to the cam-
era, as he walks hurriedly to his apart-
ment. Then he lists his top five: the same
name, five times—Ben, a lawyer whom
we meet in tenderly written flashbacks.
The storytelling is confident and grace-
ful. “I wish I’d known it wasn’t gonna last,”
Simon says. “I would’ve enjoyed it more.”
V
iewers will not yearn to dress like
any of the five Acosta children in
the Freeform remake of “Party of Five,”
another nineties landmark, which débuted
in early January. Powerfully uncool—the
kids wear flared jeans, tight Henley shirts,
and shag haircuts—the reboot is justified
instead by a kernel of social emergency;
Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman,
who created the original, started devel-
oping the new series in 2016. Whereas
the original siblings, the middle-class
white Salingers of San Francisco, enter
the adult world after their parents are
killed in a car accident, the Acostas, Mex-
ican-Americans living in a city resem-
bling Los Angeles, are made de-facto
orphans after ICE agents descend on the
family restaurant.
With their parents violently removed
from their lives, the children must keep
the business afloat and learn to raise one
another and their youngest brother, the
baby, Rafa. Emilio, a DACA recipient and
womanizing musician (the counterpart
of Matthew Fox’s Charlie), straightens
up, moves back home, and appoints him-
self the disciplinarian. The high-achiev-
ing Lucia starts acting out, throwing
house parties. Beto, a block-headed ath-
lete, skips classes to help run the restau-
rant. Valentina, the youngest sister, a pre-
cocious middle schooler, mimics adult
talk in a way that is melancholic, imbued
with tragic double meaning: “One of
these days, I’ll be gone, and then what
are you gonna do?” she asks a sibling.
It’s “issues” television—each episode
imparts a moral lesson. There is way too
much acoustic guitar. The Trump Ad-
ministration is never mentioned. The
closest thing to political commentary is
provided by Lucia, who occasionally curses
“this country.” Visiting her parents at the
detention center shortly before they are
deported, she begins to disintegrate,
picking a fight with an agent. Her father
reprimands her: “Dignity, mija!” The
dynamic, though swiftly drawn, is an
honest portrayal of so many immigrant
families: the parent made obeisant by his
circumstances; the daughter indignant
and enlarged by her rage and relative en-
titlement. It won’t go viral, but “Party of
Five” has heart.
©2020 KENDAL
Connecting
generations.
1.800.548.9469
kao.kendal.org/intergenerational
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