There are a number of reasons audiences like returning to television series they loved as teenagers. For starters, most of them were written by people in their twenties and thirties. In the case of exasperated grownup millennials, it’s a nostalgic return to a simpler time before they were thrust into an unforgiving adult world with unjust generational standards. Many millennials and Zoomers still find themselves hoping the start of fall will signify a fresh start, just like every school year always did growing up. When adulthood starts looking less and less like those who came before us, we turn to the last period of our lives, where we felt in control.
I first sought out “Felicity,” J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves’ college drama for The WB, during a period in my own university career where I felt I had the least control over anything going on in my life. I’d watched and rewatched “Gilmore Girls” so many times, looking for that comforting dopamine hit that would simultaneously solve all my problems and lull me to sleep. But I needed something new to fill that void. Never mind that my anxiety levels had long since surpassed being helped by something like the right television show. In order to continue on, I needed a calming, mindless series made for teenagers so I could get to sleep at night.
“Felicity” checked all of these boxes and then some. I spent way too much money I didn’t have on purchasing the DVD box sets online. Indeed, watching a show about other young adults navigating university would bring everything into focus for me, a student who couldn’t remember a time when he was doing life right. If I was doing it right, I wouldn’t always be this stressed out and anxious, right? I was still chasing the highs of academic validation from elementary school, only now I had to work myself to the bone to maintain a standard which, by that time, only I was asking of myself. No problem was too vast for the right television show consumed at the right time. Felicity Porter (Keri Russell) and her new college friends would assuredly have the answers.
But they, in a shocking twist, did not. If anything, the college angst and painfully relatable storylines explored during the series’ relatively short network run only made me more anxious, for example, in the episode where, after engaging in underage drinking and breaking into a university pool, Felicity and Ben (Scott Speedman) seriously debate just dropping out of school and leaving the country when they’re threatened with expulsion.
My unhealthy work ethic would have never allowed me to entertain such a thought, but I understood what it was like to constantly be on the edge of wanting everything in life and wanting nothing at all. In addition to the average anguish that young adults go through in finding themselves, I was restless, overworked and depressed. Then a global pandemic happened.
I watched the second half of “Felicity” for the first time during the early lockdown days of COVID-19. I couldn’t help thinking of the irony of watching a fictionalized version of the stereotypical American university experience while the remainder of mine was on the verge of being completely derailed. I quickly learned that nothing would teach me what I was lacking except being alone with myself even more than I already was, now with too much time on my hands to think about every facet of my life.
It reached a point where I didn’t want to finish the final few episodes of the series. Watching “Felicity” for all the reasons I had started it in the first place was getting too painful, and I couldn’t bear to watch these characters who had grown so much graduate from college and truly begin their adult lives. I was too busy learning that my life would never resemble those of the teenagers in a drama from The WB. I wouldn’t have Rory Gilmore’s study tree or Felicity Porter’s love triangles. I wasn’t going to be able to visualize my inner demons so clearly that I could physically slay them like Buffy Summers on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
My life wasn’t going to be like that of a fictional character.
After 18 months of online courses and further lockdowns, I returned to in-person university. Nothing was the same. I struggled to assimilate into the “new normal.” My insomnia intensified. I had a near-complete breakdown and found myself in the university health clinic pleading for help, receiving the anti-anxiety medication I should have been put on years before. I started healing. I took baby steps. I masked up and went to class, finally edging toward the finish line. And only then, crossing the street at a busy downtown intersection between university buildings, gazing up at the skyscrapers like Felicity does in one version of the opening credits, did I realize it. The WB lied to me. My university experience was nothing like hers.
I suppose I was stupid to think it ever would have been. She is fictional, and I am not. I’m a living, breathing, (mostly) functioning real human. I had spent my entire life dwelling so intensely in my imagination that it became an unhelpful coping mechanism, to the point where I had trouble placing what was real and what was not. Sure, I was also a victim of the capitalistic structure that sold a series like “Felicity” as being the ultimate portrait of university, a structure I was incredibly susceptible to.
But in a way, Felicity did her job. Even though it was in a completely different and upside-down way than I had intended, she helped guide me through university. She taught me that it’s foolish to think you know anything about life in your late teens and early twenties because those colors will keep changing and fading. She taught me that university was supposed to be the time when you have nothing figured out, and it feels like everything is going wrong, even if I only realized these things after the fact. She taught me that this time in our lives is for shedding our skin and finding a new version of ourselves.
I returned to the last six episodes of “Felicity” that I had skipped the following year after finishing the last coursework required for graduation. I was depressed again, unsure of where I wanted to end up next. I watched her travel back in time and get a second chance at her senior year, a chance to change her fate and see how things might’ve turned out differently.
But all Felicity learns is that we can’t change the past without messing up the future. What’s done is done. All we can do is forgive ourselves for what we didn’t know at the time and know that we did our best with what we were given. I can’t change what’s happened to me, but I can control where the subway train will take me next.