Show + tell: Paul Flynn’s top telly
Cliquethe com,pelling university-based drama for Generation Z, is back for a second, sharp-as-a-tack series
I finvetmhienu Fteirs osftthe sc welceioqh nu ad eve s era us non thoef full gamut of millennial watchwords: triggering, no-platforming, safe spaces, problematic micro-aggressions. We are in one of the grand baroque lecture theatres of Edinburgh University. If we needed any more signposting that Jess Britain’s formidable drama, told in the vernacular of its generation, has come to pick over the carcass of Generation Snowflake, actual paper flakes descend from the ceiling to visible panic among the students.
A boy band composite of five hench undergraduates behind the prank are backlit peacocking through the hallowed acocflaiqduemeic quadrangles. If the season one was all about mean girls capitalising on the impressionable, competitive dynamic of female friendships, season two has arrived to take its own equally special pickaxe to Lad Bible culture. It is here to destroy the bantz. Uni Lad has, at last, found his righteous enemy.
Our heroine is student Holly Mcstay (Synnøve Karlsen), slaving over a paper entitled ‘Depictions of romance and chivalry in Medieval Literature’. She is entering her second year at Edinburgh Uni as a temporary superstar, an online beacon of female empowerment, after the adventures of season one. You won’t need to know what they are to dive straight into season two, but you’ll soon want to. There has been a murder.
The major dramatic tension set up in episode one is Holly’s attraction to Jack, initially the most sympathetic and hottest of the boys wanting their say-so in a university culture they consider defenestrated by pop-cultural feminism and its new demands. The friendship groups of both pan out to take in all manner of recognisably believable archetypes: the swish, laidback lesbian, the laughable men’s rights activist, the gym bunny, the feminist who can’t reconcile the chasm between her beliefs and behaviour. Online pressures are woven cleverly in.
Cislniqoutep erfect. It’s shot in the oversaturated colour of a cheap YA movie and everyone’s wardrobe always looks too brand new. But it’s the closest dramatic examination we have on TV of a generation defined, for better or worse, by the neuroses thrust on it by an unsympathetic establishment. It is a brilliant study of the hard-won triumphs of clever and outspoken young womanhood. Stick it on this term’s reading list. Begins streaming Saturday, BBC3 iplayer