The summer season of the WB’s show “Young Americans” ended last night. This is, certainly, one of the strangest shows I’ve seen on TV It’s almost a homoerotic wet dream with dozens of gorgeous, doe-eyed, apple-cheeked, buffed young men running around at an all-boys pre-ivy league prep school. Almost homo. They try to clean it up a little to get it under the hetero radar.
Scout (whose name makes it impossible for me not to giggle every time I hear it) is a rich young student who falls in love with Bella, a town girl, only to find out that his Dad was playing the same game years ahead of him, and Bella is really his sister. Creepy. Especially since he can’t stop gawking at her and following her around, even long after he knows. I don’t know if they thought incest would distract the hets from closing in on the homo stuff, or what. I’m surprised that no one’s screaming bloody murder about this plotline. Maybe I’m the only one watching this show.
He and his roomate Will, another town kid, are unnaturally close for a couple of guys who don’t really know each other that well. Will is a POET and a WRITER (it seems like those should be capitalized) who’s poor, but he really deserves a good education, so everyone is swell and gives him one. He and Scout and all the other pretty boys spend their english classes in a row boat on the lake, where Finn, the older-father-figure-sexy-mentor-guy-type teaches them about philosophy, poetry, the meaning of life and other deep, deep stuff while they all row and swim and do butch things in a sexy, Ernest Hemingway-esque fashion that could only be appealing to my gay friends or beer-drinking rocky mountain truckers who are in deep, deep denial.
Then there’s Hamilton (he’s the apple-cheeked one with really gay hair), who is the Dean’s kid, and he falls in love with Jake, not realizing that Jake is, conveniently, a girl, who’s cross-dressing to attend Rawley Academy to….. upset her mother. Which had to be the lamest excuse I’ve heard for tom-boy-ism ever. And I’ve heard quite a few.
Note to Mom: I’m not gay to upset you. Really. It’s just that I like girls.
Jake is mighty cute… but she keeps going around kissing Hamilton, which (although it is so exciting to see because she looks so much like a goshed-darned boy) is really bizarre when its so obvious she should be KISSING BELLA. That would seem right.
It’s impossible that a girl who was cross-dressing merely to spite her mother would be so damned good at it. Plus! On top of everything, Bella, the femme girl, works in a garage and fixes cars. She even fixes Jake’s motorcycle. And on the show where Jake comes out as a girl to Bella, they sit around on the porch swing and read girlie magazines. The Vogue/Glamour kind. When it’s so obvious they should be sitting on the porch swing reading each other.
The season ended with Jake coming out to the whole school that’s she’s really a girl, and then trying to do the femme thing. It really doesn’t work on her at all, because she talks like a trucker. With an English accent. I guess that would be “she talks like a lorry driver.” Plus, poofing up her hair and playing up her breasts doesn’t change that fact that she hasn’t got a girlie walk. Or anything girlie, really.
Needless to say, I’m watching this show if they continue it. I’m not sure if I’m fascinated or bothered. Or both.