A very young Scott Speedman and Keri Russell? I already love it.
Felicity is another one of those shows I somehow completely missed in the late ’90s, and after watching the pilot, I have some catching up to do, mostly because Felicity Porter (Russell) is already making me crazy.
She’s smart enough to have Stanford waiting for her with a full scholarship and parents who have apparently planned out the rest of her life. She’s also impulsive enough to throw that plan away because Ben Covington (Speedman) wrote something nice in her yearbook and told her he was going to college in New York.
So Felicity goes to New York — to follow a guy she’s had a crush on for four years but barely knows.
Great choice, Felicity. Follow your heart.
Except the more Felicity S1E1 unfolded, the less I thought Ben was really the point. He’s the catalyst for a girl who’s spent her life doing what everyone expects of her to finally make a decision entirely on her own.
Unfortunately, Felicity has had very little practice making her own decisions.
And holy hell does it show.
Felicity Is Smart. Felicity Is Also an Idiot.
Felicity arrives in New York with this romantic idea built around Ben that starts collapsing almost immediately.
He recognizes her but can’t remember her name. That’s probably not what she imagined when she changed the entire trajectory of her life for him.
She knows almost instantly that she’s made a terrible mistake. She cries during class while watching Ben until the girl sitting beside her, Julie (Amy Jo Johnson), passes her a note asking if she’s okay.
But Felicity doesn’t go home, though she’s totally conflicted about it. Instead, she starts building a life, and that’s what I really liked.
Julie becomes a friend. Felicity gets a job. Noel (Scott Foley), her resident advisor, becomes somebody she can talk to. Her counselor sees the drawings in her portfolio and recognizes something in her that apparently hasn’t been part of the plan her parents constructed for her.
Medicine might be what Felicity wants. Or it might simply be what she’s always been told she’s going to do.
She doesn’t know yet.
Felicity doesn’t seem to know much of anything about what she wants beyond Ben, and even there she’s spectacularly confused.
What she does know is how she feels at any given second, and apparently every feeling must immediately become an action.
She even tells Ben that she followed him to New York. I couldn’t believe she actually admitted it. This girl is awkward as hell, but she has balls.
Ben is surprisingly decent about the whole thing. He’s flattered rather than horrified, which is probably the best possible outcome when someone you barely knew in high school announces that you’re the reason she moved across the country.
Unfortunately, Felicity takes Ben’s kindness and continues barreling forward.
She uses her job to read his student file. She copies his admissions essay. She brings it to Noel.
FELICITY.
Can this smart girl really be this stupid? Apparently she can. And that’s why I liked her so much almost right away.
Being academically smart and knowing how to run your own life are two completely different things. Felicity knows how to succeed inside a life somebody else designed for her. She has no clue how to build one herself.
So she’s going to make mistakes — a lot of them, apparently. But that’s also okay because who hasn’t done dumb things when they were young? It’s part of growing up and becoming your own person.
Nobody Knows What They’re Doing
Ben isn’t quite the person Felicity has created in her head either.
His admissions essay contains a heartbreaking story about losing an older brother to brain cancer. Felicity is completely fascinated by this glimpse into the guy she’s been obsessing over.
There’s just one problem. Ben never had a brother. He made the whole thing up to get into college.
That revelation did more for me than all the yearbook stuff because it’s the first time Ben and Felicity actually seem to connect as two real people instead of Felicity chasing her fantasy.
Ben admits he came to New York to get away from his family.
Felicity came to New York supposedly because of Ben, but she’s running from something too.
Her parents.
Not because they’re monsters. They’re not. They’re probably looking at their daughter not as a grown woman but still that little girl and probably thinking she has completely lost her mind. On that point I can’t really argue with them.
But they’re also relentless.
When Felicity starts doubting herself, they’re right there reinforcing every doubt. When she decides she might return home and attend Stanford after all, her father has already made calls. They’ve worked out credits. Her mother’s car is hers.
Everything is handled, except what Felicity actually wants and that’s their biggest mistake. They can’t let go.
I kept thinking about this from the parent’s side because sometimes you know your kid is making a bad decision. You can practically see how it’s going to play out before they do. But at some point you have to let them figure it out. It’s also not easy watching your kid go off on their own. I cried my ass off when my kid left for college
Still, give them some guidance. Be there when it blows up. But let them make the mistake.
Felicity’s parents don’t seem capable of doing that. And the harder they push, the more she pushes back.
By the time Felicity hits the panic button on the car keys while they’re trying to convince her to leave New York, she’s finally making a decision that feels bigger than Ben.
She’s staying. Maybe it’s the wrong choice.
Who cares? It’s hers.
The Ben Problem Is Already Getting Messy
Of course, Felicity still has the Ben problem. And now Julie does too.
Ben and Felicity start studying together and seem to be developing an actual friendship, while Noel keeps finding increasingly flimsy reasons to interrupt them.
The subway guide was cute. Repeatedly barging into their study session until Felicity finally introduced him to Ben?
Oh, Noel. He’s not subtle.
But while Felicity is convincing herself she can simply be Ben’s friend, Ben is noticing Julie.
He tells Felicity he’s into her, and the look on Felicity’s face is priceless because she’s desperately trying to pretend this information isn’t ripping through the fantasy she’s still carrying around.
What did she expect? Seriously.
She followed a guy who barely knew her to New York. Ben never promised her anything.
Felicity eventually decides otherwise and storms over to his dorm demanding an explanation for what he wrote in her yearbook because she thinks he misled her. That’s bad enough.
She also tells him she read his admissions essay and essentially accuses him of tricking her into falling in love with him.
And she’s blurting all this out and then Julie comes to the door because she’s leaving. But she’s already heard everything.
I wanted to crawl under something on Felicity’s behalf.
But I liked what the episode did with Julie afterward because this could very easily have become the usual two-girls-fighting-over-a-guy nonsense.
But Julie didn’t know even though Felicity did tell her earlier she and Ben were “just friends.” And once she understands how Felicity feels, she apologizes and tells her she wouldn’t have slept with Ben if she’d known. More importantly, she values the friendship she’s beginning to build with Felicity enough that she doesn’t want to continue seeing him.
Felicity is hurt, but eventually she makes up with Julie. Good for her.
Because Ben might have gotten Felicity to New York, but Julie is part of the life she’s finding now that she’s there.
So is Noel, who finally admits outright that he has feelings for her after trying to convince her not to leave.
This girl has been in New York for about five minutes and already has a love triangle, a friendship crisis, a career crisis and a parental rebellion underway.
No wonder the episode never stops moving.
Felicity’s Brain Doesn’t Stop Moving Either
The pilot is a whirlwind.
There’s a LOT here, and normally packing this much into one episode could feel like the show is racing through a checklist just to establish all its pieces.
But with Felicity, the pace fits. This is how her mind seems to work.
Think. Feel. Decide. Panic. Change your mind. Do something else. Deal with the fallout later.
She goes from New York being the greatest romantic adventure of her life to believing she’s made a catastrophic mistake to deciding she’s going home to deciding she’s staying. And all of that happens sometimes within what feels like five minutes.
But underneath all that chaos, Felicity is slowly figuring out that she doesn’t have to know what she wants yet. That’s what being there is for.
Even her relationship with Sally, the former French tutor receiving Felicity’s tapes, reflects that. Sally is dealing with the loss of her fiancé and struggling with her own instinct to run when emotions get too close. Felicity’s experiences in New York are affecting Sally while Sally’s responses help Felicity make sense of the mess she’s creating.
They’re both trying to figure out how to keep moving when life doesn’t go according to plan.
There are some similarities to Veronica Mars, another show I’ve been revisiting episode by episode, although Felicity Porter and Veronica Mars couldn’t be more different.
Veronica already has a strong rebel streak. Felicity is learning how to rebel in real time and she’s doing it in a most extraordinarily messy way.
Veronica is also trying to decide what she wants her life to become beyond being a kickass PI, while Felicity is discovering that she doesn’t even know what she wants yet.
Both journeys are about figuring that out for themselves. Felicity just seems determined to make as many questionable decisions as possible along the way.
I’m good with that.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
Felicity Season 1 Episode 1 is a whirlwind. There’s a ridiculous amount packed into the pilot, but I think that frantic pace works because Felicity herself is moving that fast.
Think. Decide. Panic. Change your mind. Do something else. Deal with the fallout later.
She’s smart, impulsive, awkward, occasionally invasive and completely confused about what she wants.
Felicity has spent her life with other people telling her where she’s going. Following Ben to New York may be one of the dumbest possible ways to finally take control of it, but at least she’s making her own mistakes now.
That’s how you grow up.
This should be a fun journey, even if I already want to grab Felicity by the shoulders and yell, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? And not because I think she’s making mistakes. I’ve been there on both sides — as Felicity and as her parents. It’s really fun to watch.
