A daring new dramedy that takes sexual assault seriously
MTV’s Sweet/Vicious is a difficult, emotional and near-perfect take on sex assault and its aftermath
Two young women clad in ninja suits and black masks rain punches and karate chops on a frat brother in his dimly lit bedroom amid his yells and objections.
They lean into his terrified face and threaten him, voices warped: “You ever touch a woman without consent again, we’ll be back. And we won’t be so sweet.” He stutters as he responds. “You’re not sweet. You’re vicious!”
MTV’s daring new show Sweet/Vicious, fittingly rife with contradiction, follows two college women avenging rape victims on a university campus that does a frustratingly awful job at protecting them.
“People are just getting away with awful things,” Jules, a recent rape survivor, says. “I’m trying to make some of that right.”
Sweet/Vicious, which airs its first-season finale on Tuesday, has earned critical acclaim for its self-aware focus on the realities of sexual assault and its aftermath.
(The whole season can also be streamed at mtv.ca.)
It’s written as a dramedy and is often hilarious, but because the subject itself appears so rarely in Hollywood and so distressingly in real life, and because this depiction is so bold, painful and unforgivingly straightforward, Sweet/Vicious ends up feeling almost unfit for the pop cultureobsessed music channel.
There is a glittery MTV sheen — cringeworthy slang, ill-timed indie covers of popular songs, saccharine love scenes and so on — that occasionally detracts from its empowering messages.
But there’s no denying its daring and originality. The overarching lesson inherent in both the show’s trajectory and its title is that a person cannot be defined one simple way; within every person are different degrees of good and bad, silly and serious, sweet and vicious.
The show quite clearly takes pleasure in its many contradictions, which provide viewers with the same kind of thoughtful discomfort its leads often feel. It touches briefly on issues of racial profiling and girl-ongirl assault, among other subjects that creator Jennifer Kaytin Robinson has said she would like the show to tackle should it be renewed for another season.
It’s refreshingly well-written and it doesn’t sugar-coat. The two mismatched but complementary vigilantes, Ophelia and Jules (deftly played by Taylor Dearden and Eliza Bennett, respectively), do not get off scot-free for beating men they call “garbage” to a bloody pulp: they face physical and emotional consequences both from law enforcement and from one another.
“I can barely remember the girl that I was before I got raped and I just know that I miss her,” Jules tells Ophelia at one point, her voice cracking. Watching, I burst into tears, not for the first time. Always a television crier, this show struck a special, affecting chord with me because of having personally — and recently — experienced sexual assault.
I found myself stunned at how accurately the actors, imitating survivors, portrayed their reactions and emotions. I worried that Jules’ debilitating PTSD, which affected her intimacy with love interest Tyler, might similarly affect me when I try dating again.
I felt inextricably connected to the story and to its resolution; for better or for worse, I couldn’t dissociate myself from the main characters. I do wonder if watching would be as difficult and as cathartic for someone who had no experience with rape. I’d be interested to know both what other survivors thought of the show and what others less personally invested took away from it.
Unlike other young adult-centred shows like Degrassi, Sweet/Vicious spends the entirety of its season focusing on one drastically overlooked subject rather than flitting between issues plaguing teens, and it contradicts itself more often than is typically pleasant in teen TV. Crucially, Sweet/Vicious is not intense or shocking simply for the sake of being intense or shocking.
Ultimately, what is so scary and uncomfortable about the show is its relative lack of dramatization. While the characters are fictitious, their problems, their emotions, their truths and their causes are not.
Lines that in most other shows would ring cheesy are entirely be- coming for Sweet/Vicious and are good reminders for us all: “Nothing can break you unless you give it permission,” a character noted in a particularly poignant moment.
I enjoyed the show immensely, but I won’t be devastated if there isn’t a second season. This season was an exhausting, emotional ride, but it did the story and the issue justice, and rang true for me, a young survivor who is also suffering and frustrated with the lack of a support system. It reminded me, and surely others, that we’re not alone.
I enjoyed the show immensely, but I won’t be devastated if there isn’t a second season. This season was an exhausting, emotional ride