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Five Thoughts on Katy Keene‘s “Chapter Four: Here Comes the Sun”

By | February 28th, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome to our coverage of Katy Keene! The CW’s newest series is a glitzy, warm, escapist spinoff of Riverdale and with any luck, it’ll be the next big thing on the network. This week, the show is coming in hot with its fourth episode, “Here Comes the Sun.”

1. The Show Finds The Perfect Tone

After Katy Keene’s pilot struck a perfect New York City fairytale tone, the show has stumbled a bit in finding itself. It had to retain its breezy, carefree energy while injecting the narrative with some amount of tension to keep people watching. This week, the show seems to have found itself at the perfect midpoint of fluff and drama. The problems that characters experience feel real but everything we’re watching is still fundamentally fun. Just look at the “Friendtervention” scene (and please ignore how stupid it is to call an intervention, something usually done by friends and loved ones, a special name). It’s easy to feel for Katy in her new post-breakup reality; she was with KO for 10 years and it’s hard to move forward (and she’s even wearing ballet flats which is a bad sign according to Pepper). But then her friends play a karaoke track and they all sing and dance and it’s genuinely charming and fun! If there’s a sequence that this series should strive to match in quality at all times, it’s that one.

2. A True Ensemble Episode

This is the first episode of Katy Keene that’s felt like it’s given an equal spotlight all of its main characters. In the last few episodes, Katy gets the bulk of the story and everyone else gets their own tiny arcs and it’s been fine. Here though each and every one of them gets their own full and satisfying arc. It shows us that the writers are very very good at their jobs. The various threads and characters intermingle heavily this week but they still feel distinct from one another and everything is very tightly plotted. It really is an impressive feat- one that bodes well for the rest of the show.

3. Pepper and Josie are in Sticky Situations

Pepper and Josie find themselves in distinctly uncomfortable plot lines this week, though both are fairly fun to watch. Josie and Alex Cabot’s tumultuous relationship stays tumultuous, as Alex decides that he’s going to take Josie to meet with the Cabot patriarch and convince him to restart Cabot records without Xandra there to mess with things. When Xandra inevitably does show up, she makes quite the entrance, making Josie’s performance for Mr. Cabot a duet, then dropping the bomb that she and Alex were high school sweethearts; their parents met and fell in love, then they became step-siblings. It’s a very very Riverdale plot twist (especially with Xandra’s Cheryl Blossom-esque “brother dearest” line) but it’s not totally unwelcome and does explain why Alex and Xandra have such bizarre tension with one another. Josie tells them off for playing games with her, which impresses Mr. Cabot, who then agrees to fund Josie’s first EP. There’s a catch though- she has to date Alex to keep him in line. It’s a pretty gross demand on the part of Mr. Cabot and feels at least a little bit unnecessary; why not just make Alex her producer and tell a fun will they/won’t they story? Hopefully this unfortunate detail won’t make Josie’s screen time less enjoyable in the future. Pepper gets a pretty straightforward story this week, taking on her first client, an NYU Tisch student whose thesis seems to just be an adult film. When the landlord gets wind of it, she tries to shut down Pepper’s whole operation, but Pepper, always quick on her feet, its able to come up with a fun scheme that involves dressing Jorge and his beau up as cops. It’s odd but fun and Pepper ends up making out with the Tisch guy at the end.

4. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Jorge?

Listen, Jorge is probably a character that other people enjoy watching. Jonny Beauchamp certainly gives the character a ton of energy and in his best moments, he really is a fun presence. The problems with the character are twofold- first, that he feels like a cartoon character, and second, that he’s just not well written. The first point largely falls on the shoulders of Beauchamp. The reason this show has been successful is that it’s full of actors who make heightened, silly material and make it feel grounded. Lucy Hale pulls off plucky New York born and bred 20-something who’s somehow full of wonder because she plays her like a normal human being. Beauchamp, on the other hand, brings a performance that meets the show’s heightened tone- it’s a logical choice for an actor to make but it also means that when he has to carry a scene, everything about it feels silly. To be fair, the issues with his performance intermingle with those writing problems; Jorge is written like a caricature and that makes it hard to feel for him. In this episode, his insecurity around his masculinity has the potential to be very strong material. Instead, he lashes out in bizarre ways and then when he confronts his dad (who’s a city Councilman apparently???) about fanning the flames of said insecurity, it feels like you’re watching an after school special.

5. Things are Looking Up for Katy

There’s always a certain franticness to the life of Katy Keene but this week absolutely takes the cake. After her breakup with KO, she’s feeling low, so low that she isn’t even wearing colors or designing new clothes. Things get worse when she flubs a meeting with a designer, Guy LaMontagne, who could get Lacy’s out of a financial funk we hadn’t heard anything about until now. What follows is a wild goose chase to fix her mistake. First, Katy finds him in a club where flattery gets her nowhere. She finally finds victory when she runs into Guy on the sidewalk and tells him that his last big line was overrated; apparently all he’d been waiting for was some good old fashioned New York bluntness. They go to Lacy’s together to Katy can show him the store through her eyes and they bond over their love of designing. There are also undeniable sparks that get put out when Katy suddenly vomits into her handbag. Guy still decides to let Lacy’s carry his clothing line and potentially rescue the store. It’s a nice, fun storyline that helps move Katy Keene forward as a character and introduces some new energy to the show as a whole. Lucy Hale deserves a round of applause for playing Katy’s quick turnaround from “my 10 year relationship just ended” funk to “I just saved the store and oh boy do this designer and I have a lot of romantic tension” without making it feel unnatural. So things are going well in Katy Keene’s world- let’s see if she can keep it up.


//TAGS | katy keene

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