ABC’s new docu-drama My Generation tries to emulate reality television. The result is something even worse.

When you watch as little television as I do, the prospect of writing a column on it is a little daunting.  So with no point of reference, I simply typed “season 1” into hulu.com’s search bar and let fate be my guide.  The results were mystifying.  After scrolling through 20 or so episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live, and something about monkeys, I spotted what appeared to be a docu-drama by ABC about nine classmates from a Texas high school and how their lives changed from 2000 to 2010.  Sounded good enough, I thought it had real potential.

            While the premise of the show may have had promise, the product was a nightmare.  My Generation (Thursdays, 8/7 central) is a purely scripted television drama that starts by interviewing nine American teen archetypes on their high school graduation in 2000, then projects them ten years into the future for further observation.  The characters include an overachiever, a jock, a beauty queen, a punk, a nerd, a rocker, a rich kid, a brain, and a wallflower.  While it may sound intriguing, what ensues is nothing short of painful. 

            All the characters are oblivious and one-dimensional; the plot is shallow and predictable; and the dialogue is unintelligent, lethargic, and entirely void of anything stimulating or worthwhile.  It’s as if ABC scouted out the most superficial high school students in the country, asked them to sketch out their nine most common character stereotypes, and then outsourced the scriptwriting to the cast of survivor.

            While the clock reminded me that I was only wasting one hour per episode, it felt like it just wouldn’t end.  Flashing between mini-plots may have worked for such films as It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, but My Generation simply doesn’t have the substance to hold one’s interest long enough to wait around for any kind of resolution.  The dilemma’s are unremarkable, and the resolutions are unsatisfying if they even exist.

            I felt like the messages of this show, maybe something like impermanence, or maturity, or some variation on “expect the unexpected” were totally lost in the contrived one liners and flat, fake interviews. 

Everything feels way too micromanaged in a way, what I mean is, every scene focuses so narrowly on the present emotion or suggested brain activity of the characters that nothing is ever really SAID.  There is never any deeper meaning.  Heck, there is never even any suggested meaning.  It all sort of meanders in a series of touchy feely and dead-end interactions between a bunch of people who obviously don’t share a single genuine human emotion between them.  Sadness looks like discomfort, anger looks like they’re late for an appointment, happiness looks like trying to humor someone, awkwardness looks like they can’t wait to check their facebook, it’s all just so nonsensical that I barely made it through the first five or ten minutes before cracking a beer.

            Unfortunately I ran out of beer, and had to grind my teeth through this catastrophe sober.

            Overall, this show is a disaster.  It’s too staged and flat to come across as good reality, and it’s too boring and predictable to be good drama.  Had the producers departed from the safe middle and gone farther to either side of the spectrum (either raw reality or creativity) this show could have been good, and I think as a result if the actors had been given better material, it could have been downright enjoyable. 

            Too little substance, too cliché, spread too thin over too many characters.  Sorry ABC, but this show is a lobotomy.