I decided I should keep up with the shows coming out now, and so I recently watched Life Unexpected, a new CW show about a girl named Lux (played by Brittany Robertson) who has bounced around foster girl for 15 years and is reconnecting with her birth parents.  Now, back when the CW was actually the WB, they produced a lot of  good stuff like Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Felicity, etc., but after the change to the CW, I actually lost of interest in the network and the kind of content they were producing.  (Alan Sepinwall talks about the golden days of The WB in his review of Life Unexpected)  Though shows like Gossip Girl and 90210 can be fun, they don’t quite capture what it is I love about a lot of other teenage dramas.  Those shows present a very specific lifestyle that in my opinion doesn’t really speak well to “real” teenagers and the way teenagers really interact with each other.  (Caveat:  I am a big fan of The OC, though, which had a lot of these elements–rich kids with their fancy homes and crazy lifestyles–but also had a quirkiness and originality that I don’t think you find in GG or 90210.)  For that reason, I think Life Unexpected is a refreshing take on a maybe-not-so-original situation that harkens back, as Sepinwall says, to the old days of teenage drama television.

Though I sometimes tire of storylines revolving around teenage pregnancies, Life Unexpected is less about the angst that surrounds teen pregnancy, and more about the fractured family dynamic between Lux and her parents.  There were some nice/relatively typical teen drama touches, like the psuedo-popular, pseudo-alternative song playing under the dramatic moment when the three family members are first together (in this case the Bright Eyes song, “First Day of My Life.” )  A standard in many televsion shows, Baze’s character (Lux’s father, played by Kristoffer Polaha) is one of those man-child types who lives with two roomates (who are mostly there to provide comic relief) above the bar he owns.  Cate (Lux’s mother, played by Shiri Appleby), on the other hand, is a career-driven commitment-phobic perfectionist type with a perfect seeming boyfriend/fiancee, another standby in the television world.  Also in the mix is Baze’s perky girlfriend who I expected would be overly annoying and grating but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she was in fact pretty calm about the whole situation.  I  also just want to mention that really I appreciate that Lux actually looks and dresses like she’s 16 and not 25, as most supposed “teenagers” on tv appear (even though according to imdb, she’s actually 19).

There are definitely some elements of the show where you have to suspend your disbelief, like the fact that the judge assigns her to live with her estranged parents instead of just emancipating her or sending her back to foster care, and the fact that it was so easy to find Baze, but overall Life Unexpected is a sweet portrayal of a unconventional family.  Though it may not have quite the same levels of cleverness, wit, and humor that Gilmore Girls had,  it’s a fun show that reflects better the way that teenagers actually sound when they talk, and it in fact reminds me more of the teen shows that I know and love.