29 September 1998
| Happy addition to the WB roster, a smart look at college-bound girl
The first voice we hear in Felicity is Felicity Elizabeth Porter's as she narrates the scene we see on screen: her high school graduation a few months earlier. What we instantly sense in her tone and soon hear in her words and see in her face - beneath the surface of her ironic observations and her touch of bravado - is that this very smart, very pretty and very shy young woman is terrified of her future. And our heart goes out to her. Felicity, starring Keri Russell, spins its stories around those moments in life when a person begins to become her (or his) own person. Felicity's privileged background notwithstanding, the process she undergoes is universal; the strange and scary transitional change from adolescent to young adult. Felicity's first major moment of decision confronts her on the high school football field just after graduation ceremonies. Screwing up the courage to ask Ben Covington to sign her yearbook - he's the popular, handsome boy she has mooned over all through high school but has never spoken to - Felicity is undone by his response. In one absurd instant that viewers have to accept pretty much on faith - I did willingly - she abandons the college plans laid out for her by her parents and decides to attend the University of New York (a thinly disguised NYU), where Ben (Scott Speedman) will be. Being in New York, of course, intensifies Felicity's testing of her newly asserted independence, and not just when it comes to Ben. She also has to deal with Noel Crane (Scott Foley), an earnest resident assistant in her dorm who clearly is smitten with her. There's Julie Emrick (Amy Jo Johnson), a classmate who quickly bonds with Felicity and who, just as quickly, seriously complicates their friendship. There is Felicity's strained relationship with her parents, who aren't convinced that their daughter knows what she's doing, which obviously is true but, oddly enough, that's sort of the point. And there's the tiny question of what in the world Felicity is going to do with her life. Medicine? Art? Something as yet undiscovered? She, and we, will find out one week at a time. |