Perhaps few people remember J.J. Abram's seminal show about the greatest curly-haired heroine ever written (this is certainly an extreme exaggeration), but I will never forget a single whispered "hi" or scene shot in a fake Dean & Deluca. "Felicity" was shockingly realistic in some respects, mostly in the sense that some of its characters seemed to spend time in class, but it also made me believe in some vicious lies. I watched it during my senior year of high school, and I could not help but allow it to influence my obsessive daydreams about the exhilarating and fulfilling college experience which I was sure awaited me. Here are a few unrealistic expectations which J.J. Abrams sold me, expectations which I gobbled up so heartily and whose realization I was so hungry for that, upon realizing their ultimately unattainable nature, I found myself a crushed and empty husk of the wide-eyed ingenue I had once been (this is another gross exaggeration).
1. I have not met a single college boy who looks like Scott Speedman, let alone one who has fallen in love with me despite the fact that I maybe stalked him. This is incredibly disappointing. When I watched "Felicity" with my parents I got into several arguments with my father about mumbling Ben Covington. At the time I could not understand his almost bizarre hatred for this rather innocuous and harmless character, but I realized soon afterwards that my father was gripped with a probably paralyzing fear that, like Felicity, I would become obsessed with a similarly useless, but probably far less attractive, real-life version of Ben. Luckily for him, I have not met anyone who looks like Scott Speedman, or whispers "hello" through his gap teeth in quite the same way, or kisses me to the sound of Ravel's "Bolero." These are all MAJOR disappointments. If I do meet someone like this, I will likely make all of my parents' worst nightmares come true and throw my life away, but, as I am unfortunately learning, the chances of this happening are increasingly slim.
2. No one was nearly upset enough while they were taking Orgo. As far as I can remember, at least two characters took this class, an experiences which, for me, was almost insurmountably hellish. "Felicity" did not teach me that the right amount of time to study for an Orgo exam is actually all the time, that one is expected to memorize a totally incomprehensible amount of information and then apply it to novel and bizarre situations, or that the class would turn virtually everyone else taking it into a grotesque hell monster gluttonous for more Orgo, ravenously consuming increasingly unbelievable quantities of synthesis problems until they exploded into a jumbled assortment of line-angle structures and bloated benzene rings. If I had known this, if there had been scenes of Elena crying herself to sleep and throwing her ball and stick models across the room in an uncontrollable and helpless rage, I would have been better prepared for the Sisyphean task which awaited me.
3. There's actually no cool time travel in college. I understand that this seems obvious and that it's bizarre that I almost believed that one night I would fall into a feverish sleep after the casting of a Wiccan spell and find myself reliving the past, but this does not change the fact that not experiencing time travel is another major disappointment. Hopefully one day whoever is in charge of the people who write my life will order five extra episodes and, in a desperate frenzy, my creators will have no choice but to put me through a Twilight Zone-esque hellscape or at least allow me to relive my glory days.
4. This is a pretty common gripe, but the dorm rooms in this show are absolutely bananas. The later addition of beautiful apartments in which one could throw a dramatic holiday party where a friend's unhinged ex-boyfriend could show up and shoot a girl who would turn out to be equally unhinged was another huge blow. Also, why have I not met anyone like Sean, who is willing to rent college students rooms in his spacious, industrial-chic loft and then let them throw wild, sexually charged parties there? Then again, objectively speaking, if Sean were not so goofy and charming, his weird friendships with people in a completely different stage of life than him and his kind of depressing entrepreneurial aspirations, would be enough to make him super sad and kind of creepy.
5. This last one is both a truth and a lie, and is also perhaps the most disappointing item on this list. "Felicity" features an episode in which the titular character runs a protest in an attempt to make the school's administration begin offering the morning after pill at its clinic again. The episode ends with a triumphant victory, with the administration caving and ceding to all of the students' requests. It's unfortunately true that college campuses are places where many students' rights and well being are often at risk of being neglected or even outright ignored, but it's also true that college campuses are more often than not full of people willing to organize both to fight for their own rights and in solidarity. The disappointing falsity of this episode is the ease with which this battle is won, the clear cut way in which everything is resolved, the assertion that, if students shout loudly enough, their voices will be considered important enough to drown out the demands and wishes of powerful and wealthy trustees and donors. Victories of this sort are often far more grueling to achieve in real life than they are on "Felicity," and they also occur far less frequently.
