Privileged, 1x03, “All About What You really, Really Want”

Episode Title: All About What You Really, Really Want
Writer: Anna Fricke
Director: Nick Marck
Originally Aired: 09/23/2008
Grade: A

Are Charlie and Will actual characters in their own right, or just love interests for Megan? It occurred to me that the writers may want to focus almost exclusively on the female characters here--mostly Megan, with Sage and Rose in second place. They seem to have a pretty strong feminist agenda with the show, and I love that, but I'm not sure that relegating the male characters to eye candy love interests is really going to work. I loved Veronica Mars, but that was one of my least favorite things about that show—Logan stopped being interesting in his own right once he started dating Veronica. On this show, Will and Charlie haven’t even gotten the chance to be compelling on their own before dating Megan.

We did get the scene with Charlie and Lily, without Megan in the picture, so I'm assuming he is supposed to be more of a main character... but the scene was still largely about Megan, so they need to work on developing him more. I enjoy the Charlie/Megan friendship and find it believable simply because the writers do a lot with a little in terms of their dialogue, but I do want to see the guy be his own person, and the same goes for Will.

As for the surfing storyline, Megan’s self-absorption was running very high there. It’s easy to side with Megan because she was finally over her writer’s block, but when taken in the larger context of all of her behavior towards Charlie, it doesn't look quite so innocent. It’s not the first time we’ve seen her decide that her interests and feelings are more important than his. And besides, it's not like she said, "Hey, we can go surfing another time." At first she said she'd have to take a rain-check, but then she dropped into the conversation that by the way, she thinks surfing is gross because the ocean is creepy, which basically slammed the lid shut on the entire concept. Not cool, Megan.

Other Thoughts

-Yay for Marco having goals in life other than being Megan’s gay BFF.

-I've written Will off as a creep, unless he really had no romantic interest in Megan from the start. If you're interested in a girl, going on a date with her sister is an assy thing to do no matter what kind of social circles you run in.

-In the pilot, Laurel said the twins’ grades were “lousy,” but Sage’s As and Bs don’t sound “lousy” to me. I guess Bs may be unacceptable for getting into Duke, but I thought the girls were getting straight Cs, Ds, and Fs from Laurel’s description.

-I liked Charlie teasing Megan about her self-imposed two years of chastity. Friends talk about that stuff, so it really helped sell their friendship (which was being sold pretty well to start with).

-I was very pleased with Megan's conversation with Rose at the end, and also pleased that Sage refused to abandon her sister for a social event.