Cultural Catchup
Tag Archives: Parents Weekend
Interview: Talking Huge with Savannah Dooley
If you're a regular visitor, you know that I spent much of my summer obsessed with ABC Family's Huge, a show which really surprised me in its premiere and continued to build throughout the summer. After starting as an interesting glimpse into the experience at a summer camp designed to help teenagers lose weight, over time it became a nuanced take on adolescent self-discovery. Without directly subverting summer camp cliches, the mother-daughter development team of Savannah Dooley and Winnie Holzman elevated their simple structure into the summer's finest drama series.
[For all of my reviews of Huge's first season, click here.]
However, since it was more or less just Todd VanDerWerff and I writing about the show, there wasn't a whole lot of analysis being done, so I felt a certain obligation to do what I could to dig deeper into the series' subtexts – as a result, after reaching out to the production, I got in contact with Savannah Dooley, who was kind enough to answer some questions via Email about how the series developed, the ways in which the characters evolved over the course of the season, what awaits the show should ABC Family decide to pick up the back half of Season One, and the latest news on the chances of that pickup in the months ahead, all of which can be found after the break.
Filed under Huge
Tagged as ABC Family, Alistair, Entertainment, Gender, Interview, Love Handles, Parents Weekend, Phantasma, Piznarski, Race, Renewal, Savannah Dooley, Season 1, Season 2, Sexuality, Spirit Quest, Summer Camp, Television, Trent, TV, Will, Winnie Holzman
Mid Season Finale: Huge – "Parents Weekend – Part Two"
"Parents Weekend – Part Two"
In case you haven't been paying attention, Huge has been my show of the summer: the show embodies the potential for programming aimed at teenagers which doesn't speak down to its audience, mining the complexities of adolescence instead of exaggerating its most dramatic moments. Staying true to its observational camera angles (reminiscent of Friday Night Lights, soon to be part of the ABC Family…family), the show has allowed characters to develop independent of earth-shattering revelations, just as interested in silence as in outbursts or monologues.
I've seen some criticism of the show for being too close to various cliches, a criticism which I don't think is entirely unfair: there is no question that Huge has hewed fairly close to the traditional expectations of summer camp fiction, and there have been moments (see: "Spirit Quest") which lost the series' focus on investigating the life-changing moments, both big and small, which have nothing (and everything) to do with the central mission of Camp Victory. However, when the show was at its best, this focus transcended the tropes it has played with, and the show is certainly flirting with my Top 10 for the year thus far.
The second part of "Parents Weekend," scripted by series co-creator Savannah Dooley, does nothing to change my love for the show, as the episode perfectly sums up the ways in which the nuances and subtleties of these stories defies the predictability of its log lines; it's a strong end to a damn strong half a season, and all we can hope now is that ABC Family is as interested to see the other half as we are.
Tagged as ABC Family, Amber, Analysis, Becca, Camp Victory, Dorothy, Entertainment, Episode 10, Finale, George, Gina Torres, Hayley Hasselhoff, Ian, Midseason Finale, Nikki Blonsky, Parents Weekend, Part Two, Paul Dooley, Poppy, Raven Goodwin, Review, Salty, Savannah Dooley, Season 1, Season Finale, Song, Television, The Ghosts, Theme Song, Trent, TV, Will, Winnie Holzman
Huge – "Parents Weekend – Part One"
"Parents Weekend – Part One"
In "Letters Home," which was, like "Parents Weekend – Part One," scripted by Gayle Abrams, we 'met' the parents.
Sure, we only met each camper's parents through letters they wrote to them, but we got a sense of how each of them related with their parents. Trent, instead of writing to his father, writes to his deceased mother, while Will writes a scathing letter to her parents which she promptly rips up when she realizes it's too honest for her standards. We didn't actually meet their parents, but we saw enough to understand that family relationships play an enormous role in the larger psychological issues at play in the series.
Over the weekend, I watched the pilot to Winnie Holzman's My So-Called Life, which is available on Hulu and which was pretty fantastic. That series was similarly interested in the relationship between teenagers and their parents, but what sets Huge apart for me is how many diverse scenarios its camp setting allows it to present. Whereas more dramas would be content to follow a few pairings, the sheer depth of this cast means that there are a good half dozen parental scenarios which unfold in the span of the episode, each connecting to the same basic themes while presenting an entirely different set of circumstances.
It doesn't exactly have as much of a cliffhanger as it thinks it has, and treads water in a few too many areas, but there's some really great subtlety here which continues the series' trend towards greatness.
Tagged as ABC Family, Alistair, Amber, Analysis, Becca, Chloe, Core, Delgado, Disability, Dorothy Rand, Episode 9, Finale, George, Gina Torres, Ian, Parents, Parents Weekend, Part 1, Poppy, Review, Season 1, Television, Trent, TV, Will
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