Title: Selfie
Country: United States of America
Language: English
Year: 2014
Season - Episode:
- season 01 - 13 episodes
- Karen Gillian
- John Cho
- Da'Vine Joy Randolph
- Allyn Rachel
- David Harewood
- Giacomo Gianniotti
- Brian Huskey
- Matty Cardarople
- Jennifer Hasty
SYNOPSIS
Eliza Dooley is a popular personality online with around 263,000 friends, followers, and insta-acquaintances. She is also the best performing sales representative for KinderKare Pharmaceuticals.
After being the subject of her company's latest scandal and after videos of her most embarrassing moment went viral online, Eliza is ready for an image overhaul. She enlists the guidance of her colleague Henry Higgs, a marketing professional who is an expert in brand management.
REVIEW
Selfie is an interesting show about social media savvy Eliza Dooley who learns the value of real life connections through her mentor and only real friend Harry Higgs, an old fashioned guy who prefers communicating with other people the old fashioned way.
The show is a good source of information on the wonders of social media and its unspoken rules such as favoriting an insult by a hater is a way of showing that it doesn't hurt you, and that having haters online means you've made it.
However, I'm afraid it failed to utilize its setting and its characters to its utmost potential. I mean, with a character who is an expert in online life and another character who couldn't even be bothered to have a presence in social media platforms, Selfie could have been the go-to manual on understanding the complexities of social media, which would have been very educational for half the population who just don't get it.
Henry Higgs: Why does her generation feel compelled to tweet every item that goes into their mouths, including Miller from marketing's...?
-- S01E01 Pilot
As someone who is more like Harry except I do have social media accounts though I don't use them, I am really curious why most people of my generation want to share everything. I was intrigued that Henry asked this crucial question in the first episode, but I was very disappointed that there was no clear answer.
I think if the show focused more on discussing issues around social media like how to be popular online and how to maintain that popularity, impersonators who make fake accounts for certain personalities, and even privacy concerns, then maybe there would have been more viewers tuned in to the show, and maybe it wouldn't be cancelled after a few episodes.
Anyway, the main characters in Selfie are loosely based on the 1912 play Pygmalion and its cast Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, which is in turn derived from the Greek myth Pygmalion, about a sculptor who fell in love with the statue that he created.
Although opposites may and sometimes do get attracted to each other, I don't think people with very different personalities can really sustain a relationship in the long-term. But actors John Cho and Karen Gillian have great chemistry that I somehow want their characters to get together.
By the way, I like the rhyming dialogues in the show, although I think there were only around two instances with lines that rhymes. I like poems, and as someone who wrote poems, I know how difficult it is to create rhyming lines.
Eliza Dooley: So I took a lesson from Corynn McWatters; I blew out my curls and pushed up the girls, corrected my vision and stepped up my nutrition, traded likes for likes and before long, I was insta-famous.
-- S01E01 Pilot
Henry Higgs: Makeup should be light, your dress less tight. Hair should be tame, your face softly framed. No 6-inch heels, no cleavage revealed. Nothing coarse, nothing sleazy, and bring a wrap in case it's breezy.
-- S01E01 Pilot
###
Selfie
