TV loves a messy woman. She stumbles! She embarrasses herself in public! She’s inarticulate—in a hot way!
Single Drunk Female, a Freeform show premiering on Hulu on January 20, swerves from this model. Samantha Fink (Sofia Black-D’Elia) stumbles—because she’s drunk. She embarrasses herself in public—because she’s drunk. She’s inarticulate—because she’s drunk. Sam isn’t “quirky”; she’s an alcoholic.
Creator Simone Finch is trying to walk a very blurry straight line with Single Dark Female. We need more stories about the reality of addiction—narratives that challenge the stereotype that young people can’t experience alcoholism. But is it possible to make a TV comedy about the journey to sobriety without either being deeply offensive or—even worse!—blandly sermonic?
Yes. Single Drunk Female is irreverent enough to joke about recovery (Sam is one of “a harem of sponsees”). It’s sincere enough to provoke tears with a karaoke sequence featuring “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus. And it’s odd enough to keep you from looking up from your phone (look away and you’ll miss Sam masturbating to a zoomed-in shot of her crush’s biceps).
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If the plot sometimes feels predictable, maybe it’s because the path of the 12-step program is appropriately worn. Sam started drinking when her dad got sick, and kept drinking when he died. She drank her way through NYU and then her writing job at Bzzz. (On behalf of my fellow digital media workers: This was not a very incisive satire of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer last year! For reporting on the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in China! Come on!)
Single Drunk Female does its best to crack jokes while depicting the way Sam’s drinking takes everything from her—every person that she cares about, every career aspiration, and all of her independence. She gets drunk and slugs her boss, earning a misdemeanor and a parole officer. She moves back in with her mom, gets a grocery store job, and finds herself slumping—always in a very cute structured coat—into Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Transported from Manhattan, with its many picturesque vomiting locations, to the sludge-filled streets of a Boston suburb, Sam is forced to spend the year trying to repair her tattered relationships and eke out new ones.
Single Drunk Female Shows 20-Something Alcoholism, Finally
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