Television: These Kids Are Alright

Last year filmmaker R.J. Cutler and two camera crews followed 14 kids at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago, intending, he says, to make “a nonfiction My So-Called Life.” A season ago, Fox would no doubt have marketed the resulting series as a teen drama. Now the catchphrase du jour is “reality TV.” Trends come and trends go, but it is never a good year to sell a documentary.

Poetic justice, perhaps, that the home of reality fare like Alien Autopsy should end up in this semantic bind. Yet you can forgive American High (Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) the creative phrasing: What is high school if not Survivor with diplomas? Besides, this reality series/teen show is a thousand times realer, factually and emotionally, than Big Brother and Dawson’s Creek put together. That’s partly because Cutler, who produced The War Room and directed A Perfect Candidate, let the kids film their own “video diaries” and partly because the show’s MTV-meets-PBS kineticism captures the confused rush of adolescent emotion–stoked by love, self-discovery, coming out, breaking away–without exaggerating or trivializing it.

The star, as it were, of the first two episodes is Morgan, an id-driven, Ritalin-popping, parent-dissing menace to propriety who opens High with a hormone-charged manifesto: “These are the years that you’re supposed to go [bleep] wildHave unprotected sex! Go do drugs! Smoke cigarettes! Drink alcohol! Watch porno! Rent porno movies! Get porno magazines! Porno, porno, porno!” With his close-cropped blond hair, foul language (bleeped for TV) and suburban-homey getup, he’s one of the million angry wannabe boys that Eminem pegs in The Real Slim Shady, “Who cuss like me/ Who just don’t give a f___ like me/Who dress like me/Walk, talk and act like me.”

Which makes it all the more surprising to find him later teaching a gymnastics class for the disabled, whom he identifies with because of his attention-deficit disorder. The unwritten rule of TV’s teen portrayals is that they must be cautionary tales, all sex and guns and social decay. Cutler set out instead to capture a poignant crossroads–“when you’re a kid, rushing to grow up, and an adult, hanging on to the last vestiges of childhood.” High dares, subversively, to find decency in its children of suburban comfort, from Morgan to soulful jock Robby to Kaytee, a winsome songwriter with a defensive ironic streak.

Cutler chose the 14 students to be a social cross section, yet unfortunately we hardly see the featured minority students in the first episodes. But High is so charming, you’ll gladly hang around to wait. Tell your friends to watch. Just don’t tell them it’s a documentary.

–By James Poniewozik