CliqueClackLiked Raising Hope? Try PramFace!
Tired of American reality TV teen moms? Missing ‘Raising Hope’? Check out ‘PramFace’. ‘PramFace’ does what ‘Raising Hope’ couldn’t, smart humor without over the top caricatures.
Like Raising Hope, PramFace portrays the realistic side of teen pregnancy with a healthy dash of humor. Do you really want a drunken one night stand to end in living with your crazy parents, begging help from unhelpful friends and hoping without hope to finish school? Of course not! That’s where PramFace comes in. PramFace is like Raising Hope … only smarter.
If you like Raising Hope, you’ll like PramFace. Both have similar premises – average guy with wacky working-class parents awkwardly raises baby after unplanned pregnancy while living in his old bedroom and holding down a minimum wage job. However, PramFace is smarter than Raising Hope’s insane, over-the-top, cartoon energy used to maintain laughs and audience interest. While PramFace is wacky, it relies more heavily on smart, internal dialogue and doesn’t allow the action to undercut more subtle themes.
Like Raising Hope, PramFace addresses teen pregnancy realistically without glamorizing the personal, familial or school backlash. It casually shows the financial responsibility and time required. However, in PramFace, the characters always surprise you. Meet Jamie, the average 16-year-old boy next door, who crashes a high school senior party and hooks up with Laura, the university-bound 18-year-old pretty girl. In most high school universes, average, working-class Jamie would never have met posh, upper-middle-class Laura, but through a quirk of fate, alcohol and a torn condom, they’re thrown together for better not worse. Before meeting Laura, Jamie would’ve served as a punching bag for his horny best friend, Mike, or his didactic, liberal proselytizing best friend, Beth. He was the nice guy who always did what they wanted, to his own detriment, rather than raise a fuss. However, his relationship with Laura forces him to step up, take responsibility and place his child before his friends’ selfishness.
The pregnancy similarly matures 18-year-old Laura. Like the average pretty girl whose doting parents give her everything, she acts out by drinking and sleeping with whoever, whenever someone confronts her. However, with a baby on the way, she no longer acts out in the usual means and faces her responsibilities. Surprisingly, Jamie’s family relaxes her. Because her uber-ambitious, successful attorney parents push her, Laura receives above average grades and appropriates their career plans as her own. But, with a baby possibly derailing her plans and a failing parental marriage, she camps out on Jamie’s couch, plays video games with his “loser” friends and finally discovers comfort with herself.
PramFace consistently surprises me with its intelligent self-awareness. I love each character’s individual arc that challenges age-based maturity, class hierarchy and traditional gender roles. Although Laura’s two years older, it’s Jamie who continuously stands up to their families for their child. Although Laura’s family’s wealthier and seemingly more stable, it’s Jamie’s family that houses Laura during the second half of her pregnancy and pushes for a baptism while Jamie’s part-time job handles her initial finances.
Although both families start with traditional male-as-wage-earner structures, in the second season that changes. Jamie’s working-class father, Keith, quits his job to find fulfillment while Laura’s posh mother tires of her stay-at-home status. The show even subverts standard high school categories. Season one surrounds Laura as the pretty, popular girl pushing away loser Jamie. But, in season two, Laura enters unfamiliar adult territory while Jamie reaches 18 and starts considering his future.
If you thought you might like Raising Hope, but didn’t, you’ll enjoy PramFace. And, if you enjoyed Raising Hope, you’ll definitely enjoy PramFace. Although Raising Hope is smart-ish, the high-paced energy frequently undercuts the text. PramFace embraces the wacky without reducing the characters’ three-dimensional sides. Like the rest of America, I’m tired of American reality TV stars that glamorize teen sex without displaying the negative tenets. I fear for a world with TV teen moms like Jenelle Evans and Farrah Abrahams. Ironically, fictional TV shows us a more true-to-life picture. Featuring Anna Chancellor (Miss Bingley in the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice) as Laura’s mother and Game of Thrones’ Ben Crompton as Jamie’s dad, PramFace is a show to watch.
Check out all of season one on Hulu. Season two currently airs on Hulu with new episodes airing every Monday through June 10. https://www.hulu.com/pramface Teen pregnancy is no joke … unless you watch PramFace.
httpv://www.hulu.com/watch/385089
