The gaping maw of streaming service content must be filled, so somebody decided to remake High Fidelity. There have been worse ideas: The 1995 best-selling novel and the modestly successful film it spawned, about a romantically challenged record store owner, have a certain low-key charm. However, to the extent that High Fidelity has any enduring appeal, it’s because it’s keyed into a very specific place and time: the ‘90s. The last era when physical media such as records were a necessity, not an affectation.
Today, every song you could possibly want to hear is a click away, so professing to be a music fan no longer requires a meaningful investment. The millennial characters who populate Hulu’s new High Fidelity series have surely never had the experience of, say, waiting two weeks to receive a Guided By Voices record that you’ve never heard before, which you special-ordered based on a glowing review in Spin magazine. The original High Fidelity’s conceit of explaining relationship trouble through an almost equally personal relationship with your record collection wouldn’t seem to be as relatable or resonant to younger generations.
As a confirmed Generation Xer with 4,000 LPs in the house, I was curious to see how they adapted High Fidelity to today’s cultural realities. Much to my surprise and horror, the answer is that they haven’t. Though the show is ostensibly about and for millennials, it’s Generation X all the way down: Characters wear Pixies T-shirts; series lead Zoe Kravitz’s character, Rob, falls for a singer-songwriter who does Boyz II Men covers; and ‘90s indie cinema icon Parker Posey guest stars on one episode.
At the very beginning of the first episode, Rob is sulking in her Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by curbside décor, smoking a joint, and wearing a T-shirt that says, “Shit happens.” If you’re old enough to remember movies such as Slacker and Reality Bites, or the Douglas Coupland novel that was literally called Generation X, well, the vibe of this show is both unmistakable and unoriginal.
Of course, High Fidelity has been updated in some obvious ways. The straight white males of the original have been supplanted with a racially and sexually diverse cast. The basic plot device of the show is the same as its predecessors, in that Rob revisits her past loves to get some insight as to why she can’t have a successful relationship. But her dating history is spiced up with some performative bisexuality. As it happens, Rob’s ex-girlfriend makes her living as a social media influencer, which is one of the few firmly millennial things on the show.
But even if the show weren’t weighed down in unconvincing nostalgia, it would still be bad. For one thing, the music is handled clumsily. When Rob strolls down a Brooklyn street contemplating her ex-boyfriend and Nick Drake’s moody “Pink Moon” just starts playing, it feels hackneyed, in part because the once-obscure song has been inescapable ever since a Volkswagen commercial rescued Drake from obscurity right around the time the last High Fidelity was in theaters. When Rob professes to hold the controversial opinion that she likes Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk more than Rumours, the ensuing dialogue feels about as bloodless as a recitation of Stevie Nicks’s Wikipedia entry. And this is perhaps pedantic, but for vinyl collectors, it’s painful to see people run around pronouncing old David Bowie records to be in “mint condition” without even taking the record out of the sleeve. At times, you wonder if anyone involved in the show really cares about music. The book and movie versions of High Fidelity had their faults, but no one ever doubted they were made by vinyl geeks.
In fact, the writing on the show is weak all around. The characters aren’t particularly fleshed out unless you consider wearing suspenders with skinny jeans a personality trait. The one actor on the show not content to just go through the motions is Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who plays one of the record store employees. Unfortunately, she is so desperate to bring some energy to the lifeless proceedings that she makes Jack Black’s whirling dervish of a record store clerk in the film version look like Jimmy Stewart on quaaludes.
And for a show where everything hangs on the romantic travails of the lead, Kravitz, who can be charming, just doesn’t seem to have the necessary gravitas. That’s not entirely her fault; to some extent, swapping the gender of the lead role undermines the whole story. It’s expected that men have the emotional intelligence of a piece of sheetrock. And further, their bad relationship decisions often hang on the biological reality that they are caught between chasing beautiful women or settling for the ones who will have them. Kravitz is so ridiculously attractive that it’s hard to believe she shares the limited romantic opportunities of the affable everyman protagonists from the book and movie. And since so many of the decisions that lead to Rob’s unhappiness are portrayed as the result of her own very poor judgment, her role is reduced to little more than a manic pixie hot mess.
In the end, the new High Fidelity doesn’t have much to recommend it, even if “generational appropriation” isn’t outrageous enough to earn a place on the ever-expanding list of woke thoughtcrimes. Worse, the new High Fidelity is a reminder that many of the ‘90s-era works purporting to celebrate Generation X, in all its sarcastic and disaffected glory, weren’t that good to begin with. High Fidelity, the TV show, makes a persuasive case that its story that belongs to a specific place and time, which is not now.
Mark Hemingway is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.
