'Grand Army' Episode 1 tries too hard to establish its gritty credentials but comes off as desperately hip
The first episode of the series tries to drag some of the racial tensions post-9/11 into 2020, but it rings false. When Sid Pakam talks to his girlfriend Flora that the bomber was Muslim and "looked like him", it sounds dated.
The whole bomb subplot in fact is dated because all the bombings and shootings have been, of late, by domestic "homegrown" extremists. And they certainly don't look like Sid Pakam. Within the story, the bombing acts as an external pressure applied to the students' already overwrought lives.
Being in lockdown together as smoke billows outside puts student cliques next to each other, who ordinarily wouldn't hang out as much. So Sid, the scholarship kid, meets the overly dramatic Leila, a Chinese born in China, but adopted by a rich White Jewish couple. Manic pixie Joey, the cool White girl, sits next to old soul Dom, the de facto guardian of her younger siblings, for whom every penny earned is precious.
These pairings have several unintended consequences. Leila gets listed in the "bomb pussy" list because Sid is trying to keep his sister Meera out of it. Leila also gets to audition for Meera's play, which sounds like a clitoris monologue.
In the stairwell, Dom's purse is chucked around by two boys, Jayson and Owen. Joey gets up to defend Dom and casually accuses Jayson and Owen of "stealing the wallet". Dom tells her not to get involved and is hostile to her because Jayson is a friend.
Dom loses all her money because the wallet falls down the stairs where the cash is "actually" stolen. The show picks this moment (of all moments) to devalue this narrative and shift attention to Joey who gets slut-shamed by a teacher. Jayson comes across as a juvenile show-off with no real remorse for what he has done by the end of the episode.
This is evinced by the fact that while he sells his heirloom music records to get the cash to pay back Dom, he also spends most of it on drugs in the next minute. All in all, you get an idea about who these characters are -- at least what they are supposed to represent within the plot. You also get the broad themes at play — sl*t-shaming, locker room talk, double standards, stereotyping, bullying, mental health — it is all stuffed in there in this unevenly paced starting chapter.
The show obviously wants to be described as gritty. This is why it goes for a shock opening — the female lead, Joey, pulls a condom out the vagina of her friend Gracie. Plus, there are close-ups of the decidedly ick bathroom of a public school. And oh, just to add some "flavah", you have a bunch of Black girls rapping Cardi B lyrics and saying words like "thotty".
It is an attempt to represent the chaos that actually happens in school like this but it comes across as staged. Episode 1, unfortunately, makes the show seems like that new kid in school who is trying way too hard to fit in — going on all cylinders, hoping something will click with the clique.
But despite it feeling dated and desperate — some key moments are nice. Dom and Joey make the biggest impressions straight out of the gate. But the other characters, even Leila who gets a whole comic book panel "dream" sequence, are vaguely imagined and don't come across as fully-fleshed-out, realized characters. They feel like token parts in this diversity tableaux.
'Grand Army' premiered on Netflix on October 16.
