A Next Gen NYC analysis on whether this cast is the new Brat Pack, what the comparison gets right, and what it costs a group of twenty somethings to carry it. | Part One was the highlights. This one is the argument underneath them.Behavioral analyst Elle Schwartz goes back through the Next Gen NYC Season 2 finale and makes the case that the hour is not organized around the love triangle at all. It is organized around parents, and around who did not get one.
Six cast members get a scene with a mother or a father. Emira D'Spain, Riley Burruss, Liam Obergfoll, Gia Giudice, Rowan Henchy, and Ava Dash. A parent scene is the cheapest humanizing device television has, and the two cast members who carried the most conflict all season got almost none of it. Elle explains how a villain gets built without anybody having to write one.
Then Charlie Zakkour, and the moment that reframes his year. Talking to Ava, he describes what he is doing as sinister. His own word about himself. Elle argues that is far more interesting than villainy, because a man who names the shape of what he is doing while he is doing it is not caught, he is narrating. And it explains months of record. He told a producer he could see a world where he might step on Liam's toes if the opportunity arises. He said the rejection made it hit sweeter. He took the bad boy label the second it was offered. The group heard all of it as banter.
There is also Liam, whose arc is the season's real tragedy and whose best moment nobody marks. He walked her dogs. He stated a boundary out loud, which almost nobody on this cast does. He got broken up with before the party started, took a lemon to the head from his own squad, and then stood across from the ex completely unmoved. That is the first time all season he holds a position without needing anybody to hold it up for him.
Plus the correction Elle owes on Ava Dash and pays in full, the finding it opened up about a show with no villain, why the women on this cast are a genuinely unusual group for this network, and why the whole thing has the same charge the Brat Pack had in the eighties, including the warning attached to that comparison.
And what to watch when the two part reunion begins September 16.
Context, not just recap. The Edittors know the difference.
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