No. Not that one. Though you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot that’s changed in the 20 years since John Cusack inhabited the role of Rob Gordon. Smartphones are a thing. So is Spotify. And Instagram. Vinyls are no longer just the purview of a small subculture of bellyaching music purists. The world has changed in a multitude of ways and yet this new version of High Fidelity remains untouched in all but the most superficial.
Yes, Rob is now a woman, with Zoë Kravitz taking over the role from Cusack, but too little is done in developing her character beyond the mere gender swap. She spouts so many of the same lines – and almost all of the same jokes – from the Stephen Frears-directed movie that it left me with an unwelcome sense of déjà vu.
Rob’s story arc here is the same as the one in version 1.0. After a horrible break-up, she decides to revisit the ghosts of exes past in order to find out what’s wrong with her and why her life is a complete mess. Only this version seems to completely miss the point. The original used this trope to subvert our expectations, by making Rob an unreliable narrator and eventually undermining how he sees himself as a “nice guy”. Rob, and the audience, come to realise that he was the problem all along. That he was the asshole.
But men and women are different kinds of assholes. And using the exact same beats, dialogue, and plot twists doesn’t result in the kind of revelatory gut punch that is necessary for a story like this to work. Worst of all, however, is that it doesn’t feel like it has anything new to say.
I kept hoping that High Fidelity would get better as the episodes progressed and the series began to distance itself from the source material. But it never does. In fact, the few occasions in which the writers try to add new material just comes across as being forced.
Take, for example, this iconic scene in the original High Fidelity. Rob has left the outspoken Barry (Jack Black) in charge of Championship Vinyl when a hapless middle-aged man enters the shop and looks about nervously before asking if they had a copy of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You?”. This triggers a tirade from Barry who refuses him to sell him the record, calling it “sentimental, tacky crap”, and telling the stunned customer to go look for it at a mall instead. It is a quick, incredibly funny, 90-second aside that establishes who we’re dealing with. That these characters are all, in their own way, condescending and contemptible. It sets them up as being a bunch of – as one character later calls them – elitist, unappreciated scholars, who shit on everyone who knows less than them.
This same scene gets recreated (reimagined?) in the second episode of this new series. In it, the nondescript middle-aged man is replaced by a nondescript white woman who gets shat on for wanting to by a copy of “Off the Wall”. Here, Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Cherise channels her best Jack Black as she calls out the customer for being utterly oblivious to the social stigma of wanting to buy a Michael Jackson record. And even though what follows is a somewhat nuanced debate about Kanye and Trump, about how human beings contain multitudes, and about separating the artist from the art, the writers make the mistake of making the customer the butt of joke. Which makes the whole thing come across as self-righteous and mean-spirited as opposed to using the scene as a way to tell us something relevant about these individuals.
This is precisely the kind of tired, lazy writing that plagues the series. And is all the more apparent when it is used to “upgrade” key moments for our current times.
I kept hoping that this, like the American version of The Office, would be something that begins by riffing off the familiar before blowing up the source material and becoming great in its own right. But hey, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, if turnips were swords I’d have one by my side. Next thing I knew, I was 10 half hour episodes in and feeling like maybe they were better off making a 113-minute movie.
There are some moments in High Fidelity, however, that feel absolutely necessary. Like in the fifth episode when Rob finds herself face-to-face with the very embodiment of toxic masculinity. For reasons I won’t spoil, Rob and her maybe-date Clyde are in a bar with Tim, a music obsessive with a mid-life crisis ponytail, who spends their entire conversation being an annoying know-it-all, and only ever addressing the other man at the table. He is rich, and white, and privileged, and surely the last word on everything. What could a young black woman possibly know about Mick Jagger or Prince or The Beastie Boys?
But these are so far and few between that all they do is make you yearn for what could have been.
Then again, maybe this is a series for those who haven’t read Nick Hornby’s novel or seen the original. Which is an argument that would have worked back when you couldn’t access every piece of content you ever wanted whenever you wanted it. Or if the original wasn’t such an iconic piece of cinema.
This version of High Fidelity comes off feeling like a bad cover. It isn’t Fall Out Boy and their hacky, inept versions of “Beat It”, or “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, or “Ghostbusters”. (Just set them all on fire!) This is Avril Lavigne and her cover of “Imagine”. Sure it was on a tribute album that aided Darfur. Sure she had the best intentions. But even that wasn’t enough to stop it from sounding like a bad karaoke version you’d find at a private room in Super Tanker during Chap Goh Mei.
This version of High Fidelity is an awfully hard sell in the age of Fleabag. Where Phoebe Waller-Bridge is just smarter. Her asides to the camera are just sharper. And what she has to say about love and relationships in the 21st century is just far more nuanced.
High Fidelity
Hulu, Season 1, 10 Episodes
Showrunners: Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka
Writers: Veronica West, Sarah Kucserka, Josh Koenigsberg, Eli Wilson Pelton, E.T. Feigenbaum, Zoë Kravitz, Celeste Hughey, Franklin Hardy, Solomon Georgio, and Leigh Ann Biety.
Cast: Zoë Kravitz, Jake Lacy, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, David H. Holmes, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Rainbow Sun Francks, Nadine Malouf, and Edmund Donovan
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