Queer Lead Sophia Swanson Makes MTV’s “Underemployed” Worth Watching

I’m in love with Sophia Swanson. As in: I want to braid her hair in a meadow, I want to take her to her first gay bar and leave after an hour to go home and marathon L Word season one while drinking a hot possibly semi-alcoholic beverage. I want her to be real and our friend.

I want to see more of her, too, though, in general, even if it’s just on television on this new MTV show Underemployed, which’s about a group of unnaturally good-looking college friends in Chicago tackling their first year since graduation. I mean we see so much of the other relationships on the show, the heterosexual ones, and so little of her’s after the first three episodes.

Underemployed relies on a familiar set-up — the first scene is immediately reminiscint of a much better scene from the opening of Reality Bites. Post-college ennui often feels like television & film’s most well-trodden path — a result of the abundance of underemployed just-out-of-college screenwriters penning tones about their presently fascinating life. But Craig Wright, the show’s creator, is a grown-up who based the characters on his son and his son’s friends — Sophia is based on a real person, too, of course.  AfterEllen recently spoke to Wright (Dirty Sexy Money), who describes Sophia, an aspiring novelist and temporary donut shop employee, as “the eyes through which we look at all the other characters.” He was eager to represent a lesbian character onscreen, telling AE:

“I’ve always been a big proponent of trying to use TV to advance society in small ways and to improve the perception of all kinds of people. And so I knew that when I created Underemployed I would want at least one character who was gay or lesbian — possibly more. As we go forward, there will be more. I think TV should make the world a better place if it can.”

Confirmed: the world is indeed a better place with Sophia Swanson in it.

this picture is better because sophia is in it

And then there’s the rest of the show: although absolutely bearable, many of Underemployed‘s plotlines are woefully undercooked, especially the story around Raviva and Lou’s baby. Lou and Raviva, college sweethearts, have been estranged for many months when the episode opens in its present-tense, which’s when she shows up on his doorstep with a bun in her oven and, by the pilot’s end, the marvelous baby Rosemary has been totally born. But things get bizarre from there forward — Lou takes a job working for his father to support Raviva and the baby, and Raviva is unreasonably hysterical that his job prevents him from being with the baby between 9 and 5 and that he can’t answer her phone calls while working, an innocuous but absurd behavior that Lou somehow accepts as at least semi-reasonable. But most of all, this allegedly life-altering baby apparently doesn’t require food, never cries, and sleeps through the night, every night. The friends-as-family “it takes a village” child-rearing concept seemed really compelling at first, but loses any potential impact when it’s revealed that Rosemary seems to require no actual care whatsoever — I mean, she makes Angelica look like Regan Teresa MacNeil.

That situation is representative of perhaps the show’s most significant error: for a show about kids “struggling” to find themselves, even genuine life challenges are pulled off with minimal struggle, or at least buried after their initial reveal. Daphne’s career trajectory is another egregious example of this issue.

The show’s unexpectedly myriad extensions of disbelief don’t prevent it from being entertaining, though — I found myself eagerly marathoning the entire season thus far with genuine interest. I laughed quite a bit, I never got bored. But also, as I believe I’ve mentioned previously — Sophia Swanson, played by Michelle Ang, is a highlight.

Sophia, unable to start or finish the Great American Novel she thought she’d be writing by now, has been working at a donut shop for the past year and maintaining the virginity her friends frequently tease her about. When she finally does have sex, she struggles awkwardly with breaking the news, which comes hand-in-hand with her lesbian reveal.

What’s new and awesome about Sophia is her positioning as the story’s narrator — I can’t think of another mainstream hour-long drama or dramedy with a lesbian near-incidentally at the center of the action, let alone a lesbian of color.  Plot devices bungled by other lesbian storylines are delightfully subverted in Underemployed and for the first few episodes, she’s granted ample screen time to grapple with her newfound sexuality, coming out to her friends and parents, and dating a woman for the first time — Laura, played by Angel M. Wainwright.

sophia-laura

Laura meets Sophia’s friends

I’m attempting to keep this post Sophia-spoiler-free, but I’ll say that as the season has progressed, Sophia’s storyline has moved gamely forward but often lapses into a familiar territory for lesbian plotlines wherein it seems most of Sophia’s important scenes happen off-camera. (See also: Santana Lopez) But there’s still plenty to chew on and I’m still consistently amazed and encouraged by how easy it is for friends to come out to friends on television these days, having grown up with scene after scene of coming-out-as-social-suicide. It’s exciting to watch her coming into her own as a lady-loving lady, and honestly she’s just so fucking cute you’ll die. Smart, funny, nice glasses. All you could ever ask for in a lady.

Alas, Underemployed‘s fate remains unclear. Reviews have varied from bad (“relies heavily on soapy clichés and predictable formulas”) to worse (“a botch, an attempt to do a dirty-sexy-funny show about struggling (but great-looking) millennials that’s so creaky and clichéd hardly a moment rings true”) to also pretty terrible (“overdone and overwritten simultaneously”) and MTV’s moving the series from Tuesday to Saturday nights, a place television shows about young people almost certainly go to die. The show’s not without its fans though —  Flavorwire enjoyed it and this guy at BuddyTV encourages you to keep watching on Saturdays. I think you’ll like it, too.

Catch up with Underemployed on MTV and on iTunes, or watch the series’ preview here:

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3251 articles for us.

17 Comments

  1. Oh my glob, that’s Michelle Ang. I’ve sort of had a crush on her since seeing her in Outrageous Fortune so this just warms my queer little heart. :D

  2. I love this show and seriously wish the character in the center of the action actually got more action. I like all the wrong things though.

  3. yesss sophia makes this show worth watching. i started it after seeing some of her scenes on tumblr (shout out to erosum’s gifsets)
    it is kinda clunky, though, and lou is the worst, i can’t bring myself to care at all about raviva, and WHY do they have a mexican actor being super gringo whenever he talks about tequila, which is often? ( i like miles though, because he is eager)

  4. “Catch up with Undeclared on MTV and on iTunes, or watch the series’ preview here”

    Was the Undeclared bit intentional?

  5. I watch this show because of Sophia Swanson :) OMG She was so cute and funny in the latest episode :))

  6. I love this show so much. Lou sucks, but I love everyone else. Seriously hope more people start watching it so it doesn’t get cancelled.

  7. Just started marathoning this. I am completely in love. Also, definitely teared up a bit when Sophia came out.

  8. This show did feel relevant to my life because I was working at a donut shop when it premiered. Life can be hard and working at a donut shop sucks…but I love this show.

    The whole Tuesday to Saturday switch isn’t going well with me though.

    And I’m just throwing this out there…Chicago Fire y’all??? Anyone like it?

  9. Wait, she’s from New Zealand?? Wait, she was in South of Nowhere? Wait, she went to the same University my entire family went to? Okay, I love her even more now :3

  10. I started watching this show (because I am underemployed!) without even knowing that Sophia would turn out to be gay – from the first episode I identified most with her character and then she was into girls, yay!

    Lou and Raviva… I think most of what bothers me about them is that I feel like it’s probably a lot more crazy to have a newborn baby around than what is depicted on the show.

    Oh, and I’d been watching it on TV every Tuesday only to be surprised that it wasn’t on the past couple Tuesday nights. Finally looked it up and found that it had been moved to Saturday with no warning! Guess I would’ve found out here otherwise… but I feel like if you’re moving a show and you care at all about something you have on the air it would be ideal to maybe announce that at the end of the episode or something? These days, though, does the day of the show really matter as much w/r/t how successful it is? Since people tend to just watch them online whenever it happens to be convenient…

  11. Wow, I actually can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like this on TV…usually people have glamorous jobs and shit. I found the acting to be pretty bad the script to be pretty stilted but I could relate so much with the overarching story that I loved watching.

    I first heard about it from this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/underemployed-the-tv-show-that-nails-how-the-recession-changed-sex/265875/#

    Hmm…take it or leave it.

  12. Pingback: Queer Lead Sophia Swanson Makes MTV’s "Underemployed" Worth Watching – Autostraddle | mtvshows.com

  13. Recently got into this show because of the gif sets of her character on tumblr. It’s decent, like her story line the best though.

  14. Pingback: 42 TV Shows With Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Characters Cancelled After One Season – HollyWood

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