The new ABC drama “My Generation,” which premieres tonight, boasts an irresistible concept: a documentary crew checks in with nine young adults after first being filmed as high school seniors in Austin, TX. With cameras rolling, the 28-year-olds are forced to assess how their lives match up with the bold predictions they made for themselves as teenagers — and to wistfully confront the disparities between the two. The pilot sets up plenty of predictable drama: nearly every character is still hung up on a high school love. Two of them, it turns out, conceived a kid on prom night — though only one knows about it.
But what’s interesting about “My Generation” is how seriously it takes its title. These aren’t just any twentysomethings — they’re a Class of 2000 microcosm whose adult lives have been completely dictated by the past decade’s stories of the day. Brenda (Daniella Alonso) switched her academic track from science to pre-law after the hanging-chad election debacle of 2000; she’s now a Capitol Hill lobbyist. Once upon a time, Rolly (Mehcad Brooks of “True Blood”)looked like a lock for an NBA career — but 9/11 inspired him to join the army. And the crumbling of Enron touched two characters’ families. Disillusioned by the downfall of his father, a top executive at the company, Steven (Michael Stahl-David) gave up his MBA dreams and moved to Hawaii. Meanwhile, Kenneth’s (Keir O’Donnell) dad, an Enron investor who was financially ruined by the collapse, killed himself.
If you can set aside how far-fetched the notion of people’s lives as a pure reflection of zeitgeist is — there’s even a character who competed on season two of “The Bachelor” — it’s sort of a nifty device. And the pilot sets up enough conflicts to carry the show through a whole season. But while the writers on “My Generation” were busy weaving old headlines into backstories, they forgot to give their characters personalities. By the time episode one fades out, we’ve been buffeted with revelations of infidelity, racism, infertility and unrequited love — but it’s hard to care about anyone those things are happening to. The show’s opening sequences brand each character with their high school labels for easy mental organization (“the brain,” “the jock,” “the wallflower”). Such categorizations aren’t unrealistic when it comes to the high school hierarchy, but if we’re going to invest in these people as adults, they just don’t cut it. Here’s hoping that the next few episodes of “My Generation” fill out who these people actually are — and how they, not so much the world, have changed in the past decade.
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