Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed.

High school is finally over for ABC's My Generation

The midnight dumping of the fall season’s stillborn continued this weekend, as ABC’s My Generation became the second new show to be pulled from the primetime schedule. For those who missed the two episodes that managed to air, My Generation attempted a faux-documentary look at the last decade through the eyes of nine people whose entire lives, apparently, were defined by what they did in high school. Not that you’d know that, necessarily, from its insipid ad campaign blitz, which consisted of various out-of-context lines plastered across the nation’s subway stations and a downloadable playlist where you learn, for example, that a character is “The Punk” because she likes Soul Asylum and Toad The Wet Sprocket. As many critics pointed out, My Generation had the germ of a good idea, but its early death proves that you should either be ambitious and weird or lazy and clichéd, not both at once. That would be like The Brain getting together with The Jock, you know?