It takes a specific formula and something unique to nail the coming-of-age, young adult series, something that presently, even the best there is to offer falls short.
When it comes to capturing the college-aged genre, Felicity is the blueprint.
It’s been 25 years since Felicity premiered on the now-defunct network The WB, and the magic of the series and the subsequent impact of it still holds up today.
Felicity’s indelible legacy marked the acclaimed J.J. Abrams’ first foray into television, opening the door for other massive hits such as Alias and Lost.
The series also made breakout stars out of Keri Russell, Scott Speedman, Scott Foley, and Greg Grunberg, who have been successful household names since.
In honor of the 25th anniversary, a rewatch of the pilot was warranted, and it’s incredible how much it transports one back to pre-9/11 to perfectly capture the profound introspection, whimsy, and cringe of just entering adulthood.
In hindsight, the series premiere of Felicity borrows from the traditional romcom formula to a tee.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d believe you were tuning into a 45-minute romantic comedy as it hits all the notes and plays with the familiar tropes in such a straightforward way that it feels classic.
Right off the bat, Felicity dates itself, opening with Felicity’s introspective voiceovers that quickly introduce us to Felicity as a character and place us right in her head.
It’s evident within the first moments that we’ll be seeing and experiencing the world of this series through Felicity’s eyes: good, bad, ugly, and, as we often see within the pilot alone, humiliating.
The voiceover work as a storytelling tool is notable right out of the gate. It set a precedent for series such as Veronica Mars, The Vampire Diaries, and Grey’s Anatomy years later.
In this instance, Felicity isn’t just vocalizing her thoughts openly. We learn that she’s audio recording herself. She bares her soul, all of her secrets, and everything on her mind to an offscreen presence, her former tutor and confidante, Sally, voiced by Janeane Garofalo.
In one of many ways that prove jarring in recalling the timeline, we learn that Felicity and Sally maintain a steady conversation through cassette tapes transported via snail mail.
Almost instantly, Felicity projects this type of naivete that you’d expect from a sheltered middle-class teenage girl who never took any risks or stepped outside the lines at any point in her life.
Her voiceover message to Sally is already laced with the nostalgia and regret that suits the opening scenes of Felicity at her high school graduation on the cusp of getting thrust into the real world and leaving the security of high school behind.
It’s an event that has her completely reevaluating the last four years of her life and the regrets that she has and fueled by a burst of steely resolve, she finally goes up to Ben Covington, the boy she’s been obsessed with from afar for the entire duration of her academic career.
And it’s the classic, almost kismet moment that completely changes the course of Felicity’s future. What seems miniscule to us becomes the impetus for Felicity’s journey into adulthood, and yes, it all centers around a boy.
Initially, it’s easy to conclude that Felicity is this love-struck, obsessive, naive young girl who threw away everything she knew and followed a boy who barely knew she existed across the country.
It’s the crux of the series and the pilot, and admittedly, it was difficult not to be judgmental about Felicity’s impulsive actions.
The very idea that the center of Felicity’s universe was Ben Covington and that she based one of the most important decisions of her life on the smile and yearbook message of a boy she loved but barely knew is shocking.
It’s the antithesis of feminism and everything we’ve been conditioned to be as strong-willed and minded modern-day women.
Even in 1998, the notion behind Felicity’s actions feels terribly misguided, disappointing, and embarrassing.
Her wide-eyed and hopeful expression as she descends on NYC and eventually crosses paths with Ben is enough to give you secondhand embarrassment.
And yet, that’s quintessentially the young adult experience, making impulsive or questionable decisions that will make you cringe decades later as you wonder what you were even thinking at the time.
And the series leans into the idea that Felicity stands on the precipice between bravery and foolishness with her choice.
It’s what makes this as a starting point so compelling. We no longer allow characters to be so overtly flawed, messy, and irksome.
Now, there’s an air that characters require some level of sensibility for us to root for them, narrowing and shortchanging their journey toward growth.
There’s an expectation for characters, particularly female ones, to have such a level of likability and insightfulness, some innate understanding of the world and themselves, without making room for true character evolution.
Felicity’s starting point is rough, and it’s difficult to accept. You watch her while gnashing your teeth and resisting the urge to cover your eyes or ears as she word vomits vulnerability in a manner that’s more social gaffe than socially acceptable.
She’s shameless, earnest, and honest, which crops up repeatedly throughout the pilot as she frequently wears her heart on her sleeve no matter how uncomfortable it is for those on the receiving end and viewers alike.
This pilot is special because you fully understand that Felicity’s journey into adulthood is a marathon, not a sprint.
You sense the confidence in the series and the characters, a rare comfortability in knowing there will be time and space to let the story unfold at its own pace.
We don’t see that anymore.
In fact, with Felicity, it’s not once but twice that her decisions for her future are so profoundly tied to Ben Covington.
He’s the reason she’s in New York instead of at Stanford, and then, he’s the reason she ultimately stays; after some forward movement in her self-awareness, she still recites his line about seeing what the city looks like when it snows as an explanation for why she’s doubling down with her decision.
Yes, frustratingly enough, Felicity’s origin story, the first page in this new chapter in her life, is that she upended her life and everything that she knew for a boy.
But then the pilot excels at shaping and adding more context to this in a rewarding manner, proving it’s far more complex than what’s presented on the surface.
Through her conversation with her advisor, she learns that her parents believe and see her as someone who isn’t “independently-minded.” As harsh and critical as that sentiment is, it’s not inherently wrong either.
They believe this because they’ve essentially raised her to be this way. Felicity expresses that her father had her entire life mapped out for her since she was a kid.
If she lacks independence and any sense of individualism, she’s spent her entire life under her parents’ thumb, weighed down by all these expectations they have of her.
The interactions with her parents provide the most insight into Felicity and thus give us that peek into how she clicks, making her a compelling albeit flawed protagonist worth rooting for in the end.
We essentially learn that we can’t quite reduce Felicity’s decision to being “about a boy.” It’s far deeper than that.
Ben Covington and his beautifully worded, vulnerable yearbook entry was a lifeline.
Dear Felicity, Here it goes. I watched you for four years, always wondered what you were like, and what was going on in your mind all that time when you were so quiet, just thinking. Drawing in your notebook. I should’ve just asked you, but I never asked you. So now, four years later, I don’t even know you. But I admire you. Well, that makes me sound crazy, but I’m okay with that. So take care of yourself. Love, Ben P.S. I would’ve said, “Keep in touch,” but unfortunately, we were never in touch.
He represented so much more than just a guy she liked that she followed across the country but rather her first opportunity to decide for herself.
Interestingly enough, in the pilot, not even Felicity seems fully cognizant of how little her choice has to do with Ben, specifically so much as the escapism that he represents.
Felicity spoke of her father’s plan for her as if she was removed from it altogether, as if it was a series of checks off of a list with this monotone detachment.
And when pressed further by anyone around, namely her advisor, it’s evident that she’s never even envisioned what her life could look like outside of this plan.
She is, in fact, susceptible to other people’s influence, obviously evident by this crucial decision that changed her life. Then, she takes a step in the right direction when faced with her parents essentially bribing her to get back on track for Stanford.
A pivotal moment is the realization that she didn’t even get into Stanford by her own merit but rather by her father’s manipulations. And thus, even her decision to even entertain sticking to the plan is stripped from her.
What’s fascinating about Felicity is that it’s not so much the initial choice she made but the ones after that that define and reaffirm her journey.
Felicity also produced one of the hallmark love triangles in television history. And the pilot lays the groundwork for four years of volleying back and forth between Ben and Noel.
Scott Speedman is instantly charismatic as Ben, who exudes an aloofness but also a hidden depth that instantly implies that there is far more to the character than meets the eye.
By the end of the pilot, it’s evident that Ben is escaping, too. The pilot hints at some of his family issues that will unspool later throughout the series.
The argument at his graduation ceremony with his mother was subtle yet illuminating. That moment following up with Ben indulging in a rare moment of vulnerability with his message in Felicity’s yearbook makes you fall in love with him every bit as much as Felicity has.
His message is that of the popular boy with hidden depths and innate intuitiveness you wouldn’t anticipate.
He spoke as a boy who was very much aware of Felicity almost as much as she was him, who admired how stable she was in who and what she was and what she had planned for her life.
He expressed this mild curiosity in her and a longing to be understood by someone, projecting that onto her. And, as evident by their argument later, it’s apparent that he was very much aware of her affection for him and enjoyed it on some level.
You sympathize with Ben throughout the pilot, especially when he doesn’t know how to react to Felicity’s bold and awkward admission.
It was also tough to hear that she had violated his privacy by reading his admission essay and blaming him for leading her on with his message.
Ben experienced the brunt of everyone’s expectations of him and this image he felt compelled to uphold for so long, prompting him to escape to NYC, too.
And yet, while there, he had to deal with the pedestal Felicity placed him on that compelled him to do and be better. All of this sets up the crux of Ben and Felicity’s relationship, both as friends and a ship.
Meanwhile, Scott Foley‘s Noel Crane is charming and a bit awkward and goofy, serving as a romantic foil for Ben in an endearing albeit at times obnoxious way.
The pilot quickly establishes what he has to offer to Felicity, serving as her consummate confidant in nearly any situation, a role he slipped into effortlessly and instantly.
With Noel, they immediately capture that he’s the one who will spend a significant portion of the series pining for her.
And refreshingly, the series doesn’t play subtly with this, flat out having the character express his feelings for her casually and honestly in his plea to get her to stay.
Yet despite that, he reveals it as an acknowledgment and not something he’d allow to interfere with how he conducts himself or approaches the friendship they forge.
A level of shameless vulnerability to these characters feels almost foreign to what we have now. From the love triangle component to the flagrant introspection and extensive, expansive vocabulary, Felicity feels reminiscent of its WB sister series, Dawson’s Creek.
The pilot also establishes two separate love triangles involving Felicity and Ben with a refreshing maturity..
