I watched the Felicity (1998) Pilot Episode
One minute, you are at a blood drive in Palo Alto; the next, you are on a journey of radical self-knowledge at not-NYU.
The only thing I remembered about this WB11 series, having only been 7 or 8 years old during its heyday, was that actress Keri Russel, who plays the young, bright-eyed, and originally bushy-haired title character, got death threats from fans for her infamous Season 2 pixie cut. Beyond those Hair Don’t blurbs in my mom’s People magazines, I vaguely knew that the show was about a young woman going off to school in New York City.
Our heroine’s journey to college begins at her high school graduation. The camera pans over everyone’s reactions to the ceremony, the audience, students, the speaker, Felicity’s parents, and Felicity, while her voiceover confesses her numbing dread and fear that her high school experience will forever be like a phantom limb. And that is the central mechanism for this pilot, confession, practiced to both revelatory and clinical degrees.
The triggering event that drives the entire series is one viewers do not get to see—Felicity meeting her classmate Ben while volunteering at her high school’s blood drive a few years prior. After the graduation ceremony, she hunts down Ben and asks him to sign her yearbook. He sits down in the grass and writes a whole paragraph about how he ignored her for four years but always wondered what she was like from afar. She quickly reads it and yells after him, asking where he is going to school, “New York!” he yells back over his shoulder, and we’re off to the races.
Felicity follows Ben to a school that is not named NYU but is NYU and immediately runs into him while getting her student ID photo taken. He has a girl on his arm, kisses her, and then asks Felicity, “What’s your name again?” Crashing down from the high of her impulsive decision to follow Ben, Felicity goes to see her college advisor. Her advisor relays to her that her parents don’t think she is an independent thinker who could hack it in the Big Apple. She gives the advisor her painting portfolio despite being PreMed and leaves.
During her first class, she starts crying, and from a few seats over, a girl passes her a note asking if she will be okay; Felicity responds as wise as she is a fundamentally foolish 18-year-old: No, but I will be. The girl sends a note back that says, Is our teacher’s hair on backward? Which is an out-and-out gag. After class, Felicity and her new friend Julie go to the dining hall together. Felicity quickly spots Ben a few tables away and pulls him into a stairwell to talk.
“I came to New York because of you,” she immediately divulges, information that you could not waterboard out of the average person. He responds that he is flattered, and she says she is now over her crush, and they agree to be friends. Boundary issues abound; Felicity has a work-study job where she can access everyone’s personal records, and so she decides to steal a copy of Ben’s college application.
Enter Felicity’s RA, Noel. He is peeping in on her in her nightie and knocks on her door to tell her that he is “the dorm floor shrink.” She goes right to his room that night to confess her sin and reads Ben’s college application out loud to him, a sad story about his deceased brother. Noel gives her some relatively sage advice that everything feels so heightened and high stakes right now, but she’ll see things for what they are in a few months. On my first watch, it is hard to tell what the Noel-Felicity relationship is set up for. A friend zone plotline? Campus sexual assault cautionary tale? Or a will-they-or-won’t-they romantic endgame?
This is followed up with a classic smart goodie girl-popular bad boy tutoring trope deployed by Ben, though maybe this was, in fact, the blueprint for later early season WB11 episodes, first for Gilmore Girl’s Teach Me Tonight (2002) and later One Tree Hill’s Life in a Glass House (2003). RA Noel walks in on Felicity tutoring Ben and, in a jealous fit, confronts Felicity about why the floor calendar she volunteered to help with isn’t done even though it doesn’t need to be ready for two weeks.
Felicity invites Ben to her and Julie’s poetry study night, and Julie declines the invitation, saying she doesn’t want to be the “fifth wheel” (even though technically it would be the third wheel), but Felicity insists they are just old friends from high school and Julie acquiesces. Once at the cafe to study, Julie gets up to go to the bathroom, and Ben quickly announces that he is into Julie and checks in to make sure it is okay with Felicity. Felicity has a moment of panic and then recovers with a very poised response. Her cool facade quickly crumbles, though, and later that night, she goes to Ben’s apartment, accuses him of making her fall in love with him, and tells him every action has consequences, i.e., his oddly intimate yearbook note. Felicity continues to confess compulsively without a thought to her pride and tells Ben that she also read his college essay. He tells her she does not know him and that he didn’t make her move to NYC. Then Julie comes out of the shadows to the door and runs out from behind Ben to leave. Ben is wearing a short-sleeved, button-down shirt with a metallic Greek vase motif that has to be seen more than it can be described.
When Felicity withdraws from NYU, her advisor tells her he looked at her painting portfolio, and she is An Artist, introducing a would-be core series sub-conflict—Felicity: doctor or painter? As she packs up her dorm room, Ben brings her an envelope with a cassette tape in it from Felicity’s French tutor cum pen pal, who moved to New Mexico in the wake of her husband’s death. Ben then takes Felicity up on the roof and tells her the truth: the heart-wrenching story about his brother in his college application is a lie; he doesn’t even have a brother. He confesses that he believes himself to be a shallow loser underneath all his former popularity, a fraud, and not the person she thinks she is in love with. He came to New York to escape that fraudulent feeling.
“I’d never made a substantial choice in my life,” Felicity responds, explaining that he was her permission to finally make a big decision, even if it was embarrassing and a mistake.
I found this confession to be a hallmark of my own extended adolescence. As a young person, I wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, and do anything. I leveraged every aching feeling I had as an excuse to wear different hats, to see which one I liked the best, or so I could say I tried on any at all. I didn’t know who I was and was perhaps more troubled than Felicity, but I knew who intrigued me and followed my heart into moving traffic just like her. Making known mistakes, ones that appeared “girlish” or just plain dumb from the outside, soothed my angsty interior dread. The “mistakes” brought me humiliation and felicity, as each knee-jerk decision brought me more blank pages to print new leases on life across Nebraska, North Carolina, California, Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Texas. The subplots of my self-injuries sat beautifully outside the purview of whatever I was supposed to be doing. It was my soul’s emergency to be away from anyone and everyone who knew me so I could try and truly see myself for the first time. This is Felicity and Ben’s shared bourgeois, coming-of-age arc, as well.
Felicity’s RA Noel similarly sees her decision to come to NYU as a challenge from fate and says that in 5 or 10 years, she will be confronted with the same issue over and over again if she does not face her journey here and now at NYU. But Felicity is not yet convinced. She asks Noel a pretty confronting question: “Do you have feelings for me?” and pretty breezily admits, “Yeah.”
Cut to a fancy restaurant where she is dining with her parents. They are excited to tell her she can go back to Stanford and pick up right where she left off; her dad “took care of it, like they took care of it in the fall.” This is the first time Felicity learns that she didn’t get into Stanford on her own merit but from her Dad’s string-pulling. During this luncheon, she realizes that her childish mistake is her only possession in the world and decides to see it through. Her dad blows a hair plug over her flip-flop and says they aren’t going to bail her out next time.
Now Felicity is wearing her hair down for the first time. It is blowing in the breeze. She is walking down the city street, buzzing with yellow cabs, and the cassette from her French tutor plays over the slow motion montage. Her teacher thinks she has made a great choice and can’t wait to see what happens, perhaps inviting viewers to agree. She finds Julie near a park bench and tells her she is staying, and they bounce down the avenue. And the table is well set for a soapy season of love triangles, budding friendships, family conflict, and the pursuit of self-knowledge.
At points, J.J. Abram’s pilot script begs the audience to ask, “Are we supposed to believe someone who we are being told is so smart could be so stupid?” We are invited to have the second-wave feminism leap out of our chests at the premise of Felicity chasing a boy across the country. Then you might find yourself yelling at the screen, “No one would ever say that!” On the surface, the melodrama speed run and confessional bent can make for a comedic retro rewatch here. Then, as the episode winds down and the characters start to confront each other more and more honestly, it left me wondering — did Cameron Crowe watch Felicity? Could Elizabethtown (2005) exist without Felicity?
There are righteously infamous takedowns of Crowe’s manic pixie dream girl worth rereading that I like to counterbalance with indulging in the sentimentality of girl-meets-boy while pursuing their passions or finding their passions while pursuing love—something that happens at people’s jobs every day. Then I remembered that Crowe is a long-time friend of Abrams, and they made Roadies (2016) together featuring Machine Gun Kelly. Then I remember that my cinephile boyfriend loves Cameron Crowe, and it feels like I’ll never not be Felicity anyhow as I follow him into the darkness of being a Cock’s Crowe, or whatever we are calling auteurist who laude Crowe these days.
But what Felicity and Elizabethtown have in common are their young, sharp female protagonists who get to both pursue the adventure of a lifetime and (spoilers) get the guy. Maybe she started the adventure because of the guy, but that’s not the point…is it? It is about having more faith in the reflection you see in the eyes of a stranger than mom and dad’s because you are 18-26 years old and still believe you can escape becoming them.
In that final scene between Ben and Felicity, where they talk on the roof, this all comes together for me nicely. It is a painstakingly self-aware portrayal of how book smarts and genuine faith operate in sheltered youth. The ways Felicity confesses her whole world to Ben and he reciprocates makes for exciting television. In the same ways that young people shut down and ostracize people for their differences or vulnerability, privileged naivety can also presume a level of understanding. Felicity’s peers have never seen the red flags she may or may not be carting out in her home-schoolish vulnerability, and vis-a-versa, these characters decide to grant each other grace in their shared logic of new beginnings, believable or not, that leeway is consistent.