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 takes a pretty sizable dip in its quality, making some bizarre tonal and structural decisions. There are wonderful moments that are more than welcome but overall, the episode fails to feel worth the effort.
1. An Unearned, Unnecessary Structural Choice
5 episodes into the existence of Katy Keene, the show has given us a bottle episode. Bottle episodes- episodes of tv that almost exclusively feature the main cast on the main set of the show- usually come well into a series’s run, when the budget is running low. These episodes have the potential to deliver some truly great television like in Community’s Season 2 episode, “Cooperative Calligraphy.” The thing is, they’re only great when you have very well-established character motivations and relationships as well as a real sense of history within the show. This episode of Katy Keene, in which the main cast is trapped in Katy, Jorge, and Josie’s apartment during a polar vortex (a genuinely funny New York plot device), is totally lacking in everything that makes a bottle episode great. So instead of an interesting exploration of our cast of characters and their relationships that switches up the formula, we get drama and tension that is both introduced and wrapped up within these 42 minutes. If last week was a perfect tonal moment for the show, this week is a lesson in what not to do.
2. Trouble in Paradise
The A-plot this week follows Katy as she tries to design a dress for Gloria in under a day so she can get a letter of recommendation for Parsons School of Design. While Katy designs the dress in the bath, Jorge decides to use Katy’s mother’s sewing machine to make a Ginger dress that she hadn’t finished and immediately breaks it. When Katy finds out, she (reasonably) gets incredibly angry after Jorge says that it’s “just a sewing machine.” She goes off, explaining how selfish he is and that she should’ve been able to do something for herself one time. After a musical apology from Jorge fails to really fix things, he makes the large and genuinely kind gesture of giving Katy his grandmother’s old sewing machine. When it comes down to it, though, Jorge does something truly, deeply insensitive and messed up and they make up with a gesture that he should’ve been able to think of right off the bat. It feels like the show just decided to pit the Katy and Jorge against one another just for the sake of doing it and not for any organic or interesting reasons.
3. You Know What They Say About Assuming
Early on in the episode, Alex Cabot runs into Chubby’s with a gossip paper in hand- the fact that he and Xandra were in a relationship in high school has leaked to the press (how this information wasn’t mainstream knowledge already is beyond me). She immediately assumes that Pepper leaked it to the press and the two spend the whole episode in weird tension with one another. Pepper denies leaking it and they just go back and forth insulting each other a lot. Later, Josie calls the hotel Pepper used to live in and finds out that she got kicked out and has a massive debt there. Eventually they call a truce and Josie keeps Pepper’s secret but that decision doesn’t seem to be rooted in anything. It happens just because and it makes the whole storyline feel like filler. Also, Jorge discovers Josie’s $20,000 check from Papa Cabot and makes Josie give a monologue about feeling like a commodity. Again, it’s weird manufactured tension (moreso than all writing is manufacturing tension) and it ultimately gets us nowhere.
4. A Decent Jorge Subplot
Jorge gets a second plot thread this week but this one has the distinction of being actually nice to watch. Early in the episode, Jorge is going to work as Ginger and walks past his mother in the hall; for the rest of the episode, he’s constantly on edge, worried that she’s found out that he does drag and that she’ll reject him, just like she and his father did when he came out as gay. Ultimately, after he and Katy have their heart to heart, he introduces his mother to Ginger. She asks what it means, he explains that he does drag, and she comments on how much she reminds him of herself. It’s a nice, understated moment- one that feels emotionally grounded and real. My biggest complaint about Jorge has been that he’s been like a cartoon character with cartoon storylines and while he’s still ridiculous for half of this episode, this is a welcome step forward that I hope is a good omen for this character going forward.
5. Let’s Hear it for the Good Parts
Jorge’s musical apology was absolutely delightful. Whenever this show breaks out into song it is entirely ridiculous and endlessly fun; when Pepper kicks off the group’s little show, referencing how silly it is, it’s funny. When they start doing choreography, it’s very fun. When Katy slowly but surely joins in on that choreography and then starts singing, it’s transcendent. All that this show should ever be is moments like that. It’s so earnestly silly, so perfectly staged, so genuinely joyful, that if you aren’t having fun, you’re taking yourself too seriously. Also good: the fashion show of Katy’s designs at the beginning, the introduction of Chubby’s basement recording studio that Alex Cabot refurbishes, Josie and Alex finally getting together for real, and the revelation that Katy’s mom’s sewing machine was exclusive to Lacy’s employees which means that we will get to see an Extremely Loud and Incredibly Keene storyline play out.
