by Cori Fulcher

I wanted to like Selfie. I liked the main actors and I like My Fair Lady. For a moment, I thought it was going to be a musical, and that made me very excited. The trailer made me cringe, but I brushed it off. Karen Gillan was playing a mean girl! John Cho was playing a curmudgeon! It appears ABC finally discovered what social media is!

I don’t really have a point of reference for any of this. I mean of course I do, I have the Internet of 2014 (or rather, what ABC executives think the Internet of 2014 seems like) but I don’t know what Selfie is trying to be. Every show on television is trying to be some other show or some other movie: The Big Bang Theory wants to be Community and every television show on AMC is probably trying to be The Sopranos. I don’t have any idea what the writers of Selfie imagine their show to be, so I have no idea of what it could be. I was really hoping to see a dissection of what My Fair Lady means in 2014, what it means for men to try to change women so women fit better into some arbitrary definition of proper femininity. I wanted the show to explore the weird new social dynamic that is being famous on the Internet. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

In the show, Karen Gillan plays Eliza Dooley, who is female and likes fashion and is therefore an awful human. She’s vapid and narcissistic and the show revels in punishing her for it. She doesn’t seem to have any friends and almost all of her co-workers despise her. Selfie barely succeeded in eliciting any emotion out of me other than mild dislike, but by the end I wanted to wrap Eliza in a blanket and tell her everything would be okay.

At Selfie’s best moments I felt like I was watching a movie within a much better TV show. The celebrity casting and pop-culture referencing really play better within a two minute clip pretending to be TV show. Maybe it’s because the $20 million romantic comedy isn’t a genre that really exists anymore or maybe I haven’t watched a pilot in awhile, but something about Selfie doesn’t feel like network television as much as it feels like one of the fake TV shows on 30 Rock (I don’t think Selfie is clever enough to be that). At its worst (Ally Rachel playing Bryn, whose only discerning personality traits are that she likes DIY and Tumblr) I felt like I was watching a network meeting in real time filled with bewildered executives trying to understand Buzzfeed.

That said, Selfie was pretty, I liked the cinematography that wasn’t faked social media pages and I liked the lighting and I liked the costumes. Karen Gillan’s American accent wasn’t that annoying. I think I laughed at a joke about SoulCycle. This not the type of show that I could imagine growing past its bad pilot to become a smart one-camera observational comedy; this is the kind of show I see being canceled at mid-season with little fanfare. The premise of Selfie is bland and overdone, and I can’t say the show deserves better. I wish it deserved better because I want John Cho to have the stability to be in the tiny independent movies he seems to want to be in. I wish it could have been a smart satirical show with centered around the portrayal of a complicated young woman with some traditionally feminine interests. Oh well.