The Semi-Brilliance Of My Life As Liz
LatestMTV’s My Life As Liz follows Liz Lee through her senior year of high school, juxtaposing school scenes with Liz’s acerbic monologues. Any one who has been watching MTV with any regularity knows they have a very loose sense of “reality” – scenes are routinely scripted, re-shot, and edited to create plot arcs.
During the opening episode, we meet Liz heading to burn pictures of her old self (re: her with blonde streaks). Later, Liz is trying to do an edgy video project for a class, when her teacher assigns her to instead shoot a profile on Taylor Terry, the stand in for the “cute, popular hateable” stock character that resides in most teen flicks. Interestingly enough, the pilot episode is eerily reminiscent of “Monster”, an episode from season two of Daria. In “Monster,” Daria is chooses to make a humiliating movie about her shallow sister Quinn (obvious parallel to the Liz-Taylor relationship.) However, in keeping with a hazier sense of good and evil, Daria eventually caves under her conscience and edits the video to show Quinn in a better light. Liz decides to commit grade-book kamikaze and unspools the tape while talking to herself by her pool.
Well – that’s kind of what happened. According to Jon Caramanica, writing for the LA Times, that scene was one of those “through [her] eyes” moments:
[A]t the end of the episode, Liz cracks open a camcorder tape marked “Taylor Terry Profile” and unspools it, laughing.
Liz and Taylor are real people, and Burleson is a real school, in the suburbs of Fort Worth, and yet this moment is pure fancy. There on the Burleson website is the Aug. 29, 2008, edition of “Elk TV,” Burleson’s news broadcast, with Liz’s profile of Taylor intact. You know it’s Liz from the mildly snide voice-over.”I am NOT a fictional character. haha!” Liz recently wrote on Twitter. “What you see on tv, is what you get.”
Except when you don’t. “My Life as Liz” is quasi-reality — real people, in their real environment, leading lives that are being in some way dramatized. Watch it as fiction, and it’s charming teen comedy. Watch it as reality, and it’s deeply disorienting.
The show reveals its “quasi-reality” angle early on: each episode appears to be plucked from the nostalgia bin of its writers and shot to a predictable and inevitable conclusion. The next episode mashes up all kinds of teen swooning and prom love with a secret admirer sending her Valentine’s carnations. Instantly a red flag goes up – if Liz had been truly an outcast (and not a fallen popular kid, as she reminds the camera often), she would have realized that whole situation smelled like a set-up. More to the point, when Liz arrives at the dance with no secret admirer, she should have been happy there wasn’t a bucket of pig blood waiting.