Television loves a messy woman. She makes mistakes! She embarrasses itself in public! She’s inarticulate—in a hot way!
Single Drunk FemaleHulu’s Freeform show, which premiered on Hulu on January 20, features this model. Samantha Fink (Sofia Black-D’Elia) stumbles—because she’s drunk. She embarrasses herself in public—because she’s drunk. She’s inarticulate—because she’s drunk. Sam isn’t “quirky”; she’s an alcoholic.
Simone Finch, the creator, is trying very blurry straight lines with Single Dark Female. We need more stories about the reality of addiction—narratives that challenge the stereotype that young people can’t experience alcoholism. But is it possible to make a TV comedy about the journey to sobriety without either being deeply offensive or—even worse!—blandly sermonic?
Yes. Single Drunk Female is irreverent enough to joke about recovery (Sam is one of “a harem of sponsees”). It’s sincere enough to provoke tears with a karaoke sequence featuring “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus. And it’s odd enough to keep you from looking up from your phone (look away and you’ll miss Sam masturbating to a zoomed-in shot of her crush’s biceps).
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If the plot sometimes feels predictable, maybe it’s because the path of the 12-step program is appropriately worn. Sam started drinking after her dad died. She continued drinking until the end. She drank her way through NYU, then to her writing job at Bzzz. (On behalf my fellow digital media workers, this was not a very incisive parody of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed News won the Pulitzer Award last year! Reporting on the ethnic cleansing in China of Muslims! Get on it!
Single Drunk Female does its best to crack jokes while depicting the way Sam’s drinking takes everything from her—every person that she cares about, every career aspiration, and all of her independence. She gets drunk and assaults her boss, earning a misdemeanor conviction and a sentence officer. She moves back in with her mom, gets a grocery store job, and finds herself slumping—always in a very cute structured coat—into Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Sam is taken from Manhattan, where she can see the many places of vomiting, to the sludge filled streets of Boston. There, Sam must try to rebuild her relationships and find new ones.
Source: Glamour