You may have noticed that it's been a little slow the last week here at The Memory Cache blog. There's a reason for that (well, several reasons), but the main one is that I've been putting most of my creative time and energy into my music lately. That happens sometimes! There are only so many hours in the day, have you noticed? The good news though is that I will be releasing several new singles (with videos) in the very near future. I'll have more news about that soon.
In the meantime, today I thought I'd do short reviews of two lightweight but entertaining series with similar themes and scenarios, one each from Netflix and Amazon Studios.
Netflix's offering, Never Have I Ever, is now in its third season. The story is centered on a brilliant but socially insecure teenage girl, Devi Vishwakumar (played charmingly by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan).
Devi is the daughter of a successful East Indian immigrant family in California. She is trying to figure out high school, romance and sex, and how to be popular and socially successful in a typical American school, while surrounded at home with all the influences, expectations and strict rules for girls of her family's traditional Indian culture.
But that's not quite all of it. At the same time she's dealing with all her own teenage insecurities, family problems, new desires and her drive to succeed in school and with her friends, she's also trying to navigate the psychological devastation of her father's unexpected recent death, and the void it's left in her life, as well as that of her physician mother.
With all that apparent heaviness, it might seem that this show might be depressing or serious, but in fact, it's anything but that. This is definitely intended as a situational comedy. It depicts the real and common teenage adjustment problems of bright girls from immigrant families in their teenage years, but with a soft touch, and plenty of amusing humor and sensitivity. The episodes are only a half hour each, so it's easy light entertainment. Recommended.
Amazon's series The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022), tells the story of Belly (real name Isabella Chung, played by Lola Tung), an Asian-American girl who returns at age 15 (going on 16) with her mother and older brother to the lovely summer home of a wealthy white family with whom they have been sharing summer vacations since Belly's early childhood.
The backstory on this "melded family" is that the two mothers have been best friends since college, and both are now having marital issues with their respective husbands. More important to Belly, though, is that for the first time, she is seeing her two "older brothers" in the other family with a romantic eye, at the same time they are noticing her as a blossoming young woman instead of just a sort of fondly regarded kid sister or cousin.
This sets up a love triangle situation (fairly innocent in terms of any actual behavior other than kissing) which somewhat taxed my credulity, since most kids I have known who grew up in these kinds of close family/friend situations tend to look elsewhere for romance. But still, I'll concede it's not impossible.
Along with the main romantic story line of Belly and the two brothers in the other family, there are a number of other family and young adult challenges, including how the children deal with their parents' breakups, the differences in outlook between the middle class Asian family and their rich friends (and their community), an adult extra-marital affair or two in the mix, Belly's involvement in an upper class social "coming out" process at the behest of her mother's friend, and the threat of a potentially fatal disease to one of the parents, with its emotional impacts on the family members. In other words, there is plenty of grist for the drama mill.
This 7-part series, which apparently has been renewed for a second season, is more earnest and less comedic than Never Have I Ever, but still tells a watchable story of families and their teenagers' early strivings and romantic longings, in the context of friendships that cross both class and racial lines in modern America. It's not serious drama, but it is a reasonable entertainment if you enjoy watching family stories aimed at young adult audiences and situations. Recommended.
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