Amazon Pilot Season: Highston

Well, leave it to me to finish my Amazon Pilot Season reviews after the voting’s ended. But there’s still a couple of shows worth sharing with you.

Highston was my hands-down favorite among the comedies, and that surprised me. The description:

Highston Liggetts is a kind and curious 19-year-old struggling to find his place in a world he doesn’t quite understand. To help him cope, Highston imagines a constantly changing roster of celebrity friends who provide him with comfort and advice – much to the concern of his bewildered but empathetic extended family.

That didn’t really draw me in, truth be told. But I soon realized the 19-year-old in question was living in the early 1990s (it was never really clear, but the celebrities and fashion indicated that), and was definitely a Gen Xer in the midst of his existential post-high-school crisis.

The celebrities in the first episode were Flea (bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were huge at the time) and Shaquille O’Neal – who was just starting to challenge the supremacy of Michael Jordan. As he played music with them in his room, took advice from them in group therapy and otherwise interacted with the pair, I actually felt I could relate.

It was a very odd time, the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall had just come down and we were becoming friends with our former arch-enemies, the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet Union was coming apart. We were leaving the era of Reagan and Bush, and entering the Clinton era.

For those who didn’t live through it as young adults, it’s kind of hard to really explain. We’d grown up with absentee parents, being told we were living under imminent nuclear threat. The Internet was this curious thing and we were finding communities of like-minded people online, but these people still didn’t seem real.

Celebrities were still far separated from us – unlike today when we follow them on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and everywhere else and they share what seems like far too much information with us. We were the latchkey generation, and all of a sudden, parents were wondering why their children were messed up. Parents sent their children to therapy from a young age and by the early 1990s, it was more common to be on an anti-depressant than at any previous time in history.

We graduated high school right after the drinking age went from 18 to 21, and Nancy Reagan had launched her “just say no” campaign for the war on drugs. Sex was a death sentence, we were told. AIDS would kills us if we so much thought about having sex.

But the external world seemed to be safer than ever, because we had no nuclear enemy anymore. Until we found out the enemy was both ourselves and some mysterious group who hated us – the Waco seige of Branch Davidians that ended in a fiery inferno, and the first World Trade Center bombing, both in 1993.

We started the decade in recession and uncertainty, and were just told all we needed was some Prozac or Ritalin and we’d be just fine.

This is the world Highston lives in, and I kind of feel he might be the most sane person in the show.

Hope it gets picked up.