MTV’s ‘Awkward’ season 5, episode 13 review: The NEW new Jenna
We’ve all been down this road before as viewers of “Awkward“: Jenna Hamilton is starting things out with a clean slate, and hoping that the (insert period of time here) will be different than everything that came before. This time around, it’s her after the first year of college in Maine, coming home to Palos Hills to learn that nothing is as she expected.
So was it funny? We’d say at least moderately so. We were pretty vocal that we felt like the show lost its way in the first half of the season, retreading stories left and right and also featuring many characters stuck in a rut. It didn’t feel like anyone was making progress. Now, we’ve (thankfully) had a little bit of a shake-up. Jenna is now an East-Coast hipster who thinks that she can change the world with an article, while Tamara and Sadie have become good friends in New York and are still incredibly vapid. They’ve got hearts underneath the exterior, but as they showed tonight, they often care more about big parties than intimate friendships. Lissa and Jake have been together for six months, Matty has a new girlfriend, and he and Jenna clashed in their one major encounter in the episode.
We suppose the big mystery right now is uncovering what happened between the two of them, but the question we wonder now is whether or not we care. There’s almost meta-commentary that the show provides about how much Jenna’s story revolves around Matty, since the truth is that it does get very exhausting. That’s probably why we are glad that Luke has re-entered the picture, given that he is one of the more together love interests that we had a chance to see on the show in the past. Also, the writers did a smart thing to get out of the whole “isn’t it convenient that he helped Jenna get the fellowship?” trap.
The one thing that the show still needs to work on here is getting even zanier and more over-the-top with its comedy, and we don’t mean by having Sadie and Tamara speak in abbreviations. This show is best when you’re approaching satire, and we’re counting on “Awkward” to do this for real life just like it did for high school. Episode Grade: B-.
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