Until the fifth episode of its second season, “Grown-ish” didn’t seem to understand its target audience. A cursory glance at the show could suggest otherwise. After all, it seems to have all the fixings of a show that would appeal to a Gen Z audience. The cast is hot and diverse. The show’s Twitter savvily abstains from starting its tweets in upper case. Its Instagram features clips of its characters clapping back in a way that is just almost funny. And the premise of the show does seem like it could yield some relatable situations: it follows Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) and her group of friends at the fictional university Cal-U. Each of the friends has one or two identities—Republican, Jewish, drug dealer, stoner—in which the writers have rooted their personalities, which are drawn just distinctly enough that they could be real people.
But the show is, ultimately, just weird. “Grown-ish” is a sitcom, and sitcoms need jokes. To joke about something, however, you need to understand it, and the writers of “Grown-ish” don’t understand Generation Z. They struggle to understand them, and frustrated by their failure to understand, they condescend to their subject matter and audience. This produces a show, a world, with an uncanny valley glimmer. You’re never quite sure if the show is laughing at you or laughing with you. In the recent episode “New Rules,” Zoey has a panic attack after her phone dies during a call with her boyfriend. She later says of panic attacks: “New wave. Everyone’s doing it.” The show’s #wokeness (even if no one in this show actually says the word hashtag, dear reader, it is there in spirit) feels strangely corporate for a show whose audience grew up during the recession and is at least skeptical of the idea that capitalism’s benefits (cars, televisions, many different kinds of cereal) outweigh its costs (bad healthcare, job insecurity, despair). Season two’s opening scene is of Zoey locking her car with an app; the shot felt so pointedly slick that the sponsorship the show had obviously gotten turned it, for a moment, into an ad. She brags not of getting the nicest apartment on campus but the most expensive. The show seems blithely unaware that this kind of flexing mostly inspires ambivalence. It seems unaware, too, that there is a difference between the way people act online and the way they act in real life. Dialogue has the pithy snap of an Instagram caption; it has some of its snark, too. Characters who are supposed to be good friends handily put each other down; the most common register for conversation is contempt. After a while, you start to wonder why any of them are even friends in the first place. And after a while, too, you start to wonder if any of the writers have met a Gen Z-er in real life. Watching the show, I had a vague idea that none of the writers had ever actually met one but had instead based their idea of Generation Z on Instagram models who call themselves activists because the word fits neatly in their bio. If so, it makes sense that the characters are so insufferable.
I watch this show mainly for Yara Shahidi because she’s amazing. It was also easy to watch during the long, white stretches of J-Term time; the show’s warm Californian colors filled about 20 minutes of my week.
But something strange happened in the first episode after the term started — that is, the fifth episode of the second season. The dialogue shed some of its sharp edges; characters spoke naturally, over one another, like people. This was one of the first episodes, too, that wasn’t centered on Zoey. It was centered instead on Nomi, her bisexual best friend, and her habit of sleeping with straight girls and ghosting them. One night, when another straight girl is in Nomi’s dorm room, Zoey challenges Nomi to tell the girl in there that she’ll ghost her. She does, and the girl says, “It’s okay; it’s not like I’m bringing you home to Mom and Dad or anything.” The moment lands just the way it’s meant to: you and Nomi both realize, in that moment, that she is as disposable to the straight girls as they are to her. It was a moment of clarity; it was the show’s first moment of insight. But I can’t tell yet whether this is a sign that the show will have more or if, even in a trick mirror, there will be an angle that will reflect you perfectly.
