Guys! Awkward.* Season 2 Begins In A Week!! (On 6/28)

[Lumenskir]

*Note mandatory period.

Welp, the full brunt of losing Mad Men, Girls, Veep, and Game of Thrones has finally hit me, and with Breaking Bad still a long month away I was getting despondent and was even going to start to do something drastic like try reading comics again. Thankfully, I just realized that Awkward. is coming back!

If you don't know about the show, I won't blame you. I didn't pay it any attention when it premiered last summer for a lot of the obvious reasons: set in a high school (so lame attempts at hep slang), about a teenage girl (so boring and trite relationship dramaz), and, most damningly, an MTV Original Production.

Even after I read a bunch of critics I respect raving about it, I still wasn't ready to actually try it out. I figured that they were praising it because of what it was ensconced by, like how you'd treasure sewer runoff after traversing through a desert. But in actuality, it's more like Awkward. is one of those rare shows that completely transcends its parent channel, like if Venus emerged from the primordial ooze instead of a seashell.*

*See Also: The Middleman, ABC Family.

For the most part it avoids the 28-year-olds playing teenagers problem, and while the talk is stylized it comes across as natural to the environment and not what 47-year-olds think their nephews sound like*. The main girl at the center (besides being played by the awesome Ashley Rickards) is amazing, and is one of the most fully dimensioned characters on any show period; Even the love triangle she's involved with is more concerned with actual emotions and understandable needs rather than "Dark brooder v. earnest do-gooder." It even uses pop music excellently as perfect mood pieces and not just "Here is a song you know that has lyrics that match up to the scene."

*And this is probably where the MTV influence helps a little bit, but it's portrayal of sex in high school is picture perfect. Kids have it, but it's more nuanced than the "orgyorgyorgy" of Skins and less hyperbolic than the "Gotta pop this cherry" mentality of American Pie. It's the sort of thing you wish other shows would just blatantly copy so you don't have to scream at them to stop portraying everything so stupidly.

Honestly, you guys gotta get on this. All of the episodes are on the MTV website, and I'm guessing they'll play a first season run-through again at some point in the next week (which is how I first watched the show).