What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it.
Recap
We open on a woman typing “The End” into her laptop, and sending the completed manuscript off to a woman named Nova1.
Underneath a generic voiceover, we see a montage of a few other things: “Seth” sends an SMS to “Quinn” asking if they can talk; a bald woman makes a phone call but reaches “Eva’s voicemail”; and a couple in a hospital room. The woman, Camille, is due any day now. From their nervousness it’s clearly their first kid.
On her way out of the examination room, Camille bumps into Portia. They talk, awkwardly, and Portia is extremely happy when the receptionist calls her to the desk, thus extracting her from the conversation.
Another woman meets Seth in an enormous apartment with an amazing view. Ah, this is Quinn. She’s not happy with him, and we soon find out why: he’s cheating on her with “Sabrina”. But it’s okay! Quinn is a stay-at-home kind of person, while Sabrina is fine with staying in hotel rooms when he’s at an away game. The two of you can share me, and to prove I’m serious about making this three-way relationship work here’s a free $8m apartment!
Two women, Tye and Eva, meet in a conference room at “Vanopynen Ventures”. Eva is not happy with Tye, who lied to her about being at a baby shower when she had already left. They break up.
Camille is pissed off about running into Portia like that. She discusses the situation with Quinn, and talks about how she wanted last night to have sex with Ian (I assume this is the guy with her in the hospital room) but knew it was a bad idea. I don’t get why she thinks it’s a bad idea – just because she’s pregnant? Ah, no, it’s because Ian is Portia’s boyfriend. So no wonder she and Portia hate each other, and cheating on her own SO right before she’s about to give birth is a spectacularly bad idea.
Quinn, for her part, tells Camille about her own boyfriend troubles. “With Seth I get part of the dream,” she says, and maybe I should accept this three-way relationship he’s asking for. At least he’s not lying to me and sneaking around, right? He’s being open and honest and maybe that makes it okay?
Eva’s mother confronts Tye and demands that she grow up. “Flaws and all I am perfect for your daughter,” says Tye, but Eva’s mother isn’t impressed.
Ian calls up Camille, who is rushing to a meeting with her editor. He is being overprotective and annoying, telling her constantly to be careful, don’t take the subway, etc. After she hangs up, Portia enters the room. “Where were you last night?” she asks.
“I was with Camille, building the crib for the baby,” says Ian. So things are a bit clearer now: Ian is Camille’s ex, and he’s with Portia now. He and Camille had broken up sometime after she got pregnant; whether they knew she was pregnant is unclear.
Portia readily believes that all Ian did was build the crib (we know it’s true because of Camille’s conversation with Quinn, but if I were in Portia’s shoes I’d want more convincing), but she’s still not happy. Today it’s a crib, but there’s the birth, and the first words, and first crawl, and first steps, and you’re going to be headed off to Camille all the time to deal with baby stuff.
But just because Portia’s being unreasonable about one thing – you can’t ask a man to abandon his child – doesn’t mean she’s not right about something else. “You stayed with Camille until 3 am because you still love her,” she accuses. And Ian… has nothing to say to that. That’s a dagger to Portia’s heart: “I want you to love me!” she says, desperately. “Real love, where I come first!” He tries to protest that he promised to be faithful to her and wants to follow through on that promise, but she doesn’t want to be a mere obligation.
“What about having a baby together?” Ian asks.
“I don’t need you for that,” Portia says.
Meanwhile, Camille discovers that her editor is a bit of a jerk: she briefly pretends the book is awful before telling her it’s very good. Because it’s a great idea to make a pregnant woman’s heart drop into her stomach, right? If her stomach is that big surely that means there’s plenty of room for it.
Nova pulls out a specific passage in the book that seems to have been selected for my benefit: “You got knocked up by your ex after being told you can’t have kids,” so I now understand the Camille-Ian-Portia love triangle more.
Meanwhile, Quinn meets Seth and Sabrina meet in a fancy bar. Sabrina kisses him, then apologizes to Quinn: was that a faux pas? Seth says he’ll leave Quinn and Sabrina to talk, kissing Sabrina on the way out.
I still don’t know what sport Seth plays, but he clearly isn’t playing it with a full deck.
So Quinn talks to Sabrina, who is just an awful human being. Seth showed me pictures of all your dates! He has a great dick! We practice safe sex except we don’t use condoms! I have no STDs, here let me shove the test results in your face! You’ll need to get tested too and keep me informed about everyone you have sex with!
Quinn nopes right out of there. “It’s not you, it’s me,” she lies. Sabrina and Seth really do deserve each other.
We next go to two brand-new characters, Angie and Franjelica. Angie’s been mentioned by the other characters a few times as having a recital; I had been picturing an eight-year-old at a piano recital and was trying (and failing) to figure out whose daughter she was. But this turns out to be a big production and half of Hollywood is going to be in the audience. She asks Franjelica for advice, and what she gets is… not helpful.
Quinn and her friends meet up, and she tells them about dropping Seth. “I realized that giving up on Seth doesn’t mean I’m not going to have a family,” she says. I guess that until now she had had the impression that there was only one human on the planet with a Y chromosome.
But then Quinn gets a text message: Angie is freaking out backstage. She heads back there to give her a pep talk, which works, and they attend the play.
The play is a success and Angie meets her friends at the afterparty. Ian is overprotective of Camille, telling her that dancing too hard is dangerous for the baby. What is he afraid of, that the baby will be born three days premature?
Mike, Angie’s fiancée, arrives at the party to give her flowers2. At which point Malcolm Lee shows up, and he offers her a part in a movie with him and Idris Elba. But the shoot is in June, when their wedding and honeymoon is. Mike is a bit of a jerk about this: condescending to her, deciding on her behalf that the answer is no, and – when she expresses reservations - delivering an ultimatum: if you move the wedding, it’s off. He offers not even the tiniest bit of sympathy for the dilemma and walks away without giving her a chance to respond.
Camille’s water breaks in the middle of dancing. Everyone freaks out: Grab Ian, go get the van, run to the van, start driving, then stop driving so we don’t run over Angie, who just jumped in front of the van.
The baby is born, and they name her Harlem Parks Walker.
The next day, Angie meets Mike and says relationships are about compromise. Mike instantly assumes that she means she’s the one who is about to compromise, proving that he is both an egotist and unable to read the room. She corrects him: I compromise so much, and you never do! He points out that he compromises a lot as well, but she says she compromises more – and specifically on the subject of her career. So she’s choosing the movie over him.
Meanwhile, Quinn goes to a single moms workshop and runs into “Isabella”.
Tye gets a text message. After their conversation earlier, Eva’s mother pressured Eva into agreeing to meet Tye and hear her out. Tye apologizes for lying.
She gives a speech and proposes to Eva, who accepts.
At Camille’s house, Ian invites her to move in with him. She laughs at the idea: No way can me and Portia get along. He admits that Portia moved out, and that not only is he in love with Camille but had never stopped loving her. They kiss.
And finally it is revealed that the voiceover throughout the episode (which I didn’t bother writing about, because it said nothing interesting) was actually Camille’s book, written and dedicated as a love letter to her daughter Harlem.
Unresolved questions
How, specifically, will Seth and Sabrina’s relationship go spectacularly wrong? (We all know it will.)
Will Tye prove herself to Eva?
Idris Elba famously is not very careful about what roles he chooses, providing his stature to some otherwise awful movies. How will this movie perform? Will it jumpstart Angie’s career or sink it?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 6/10. The episode did a pretty good job of handing the three main plot threads of Camille, Quinn, and Tye, with Angie’s story being treated as a bit of an afterthought. There wasn’t very much complexity there, though, and the stories didn’t interact with each other in any meaningful way. So all in all slightly better than your average television episode.
Writing: 7/10. The biggest problem that I had with the episode was the platitudes. Camille’s voiceover said nothing concrete, and I started to feel active boredom during Tye’s apology.
But the rest of it was handled pretty well. The writers did a good job of setting up Ian and Quinn’s situations and a good job of resolving them. The dialogue, especially in the couples’ arguments, was highly realistic and reflects how people act in the real world. And I didn’t expect to find myself laughing out loud, multiple times!
And while I’ll go into this more under Characterization, they did a good job writing for the antagonists: making Portia kind-of-a-villain-but-really-not, and making Sabrina the kind of person you really want to see Quinn punch in the face.
Production: 8/10. A couple of pacing problems, and the ADT product placement was weird. But the acting and direction were both stellar (I want to highlight Sabrina, whose actress perfectly nailed the character’s sense of entitlement)
Characterization: 9/10. I really, really liked following these characters, and the episode did an excellent job at fleshing them out.
Portia is an antagonist to the main character, and her demand is ultimately unreasonable. But she is in some ways right to feel the way that she does, and she’s self-aware enough to recognize that her behavior would pose a problem for Ian even if he weren’t still in love with Camille.
Mike is unsupportive, condescending, and lacks empathy – but I appreciated that the episode didn’t make him a strawman villain. After all, Angie has a selfishness to her too: first, jumping in front of the car to prevent Camille from going to the hospital without her; and then during her argument with Mike claiming that he never compromises, followed by quietly glossing over that when he points out the ways in which he does.
Sabrina is an incredible character. The writers did a fantastic job making her off-putting, entitled, and overly personal even as she thought she was trying to be a welcoming and open-minded co-wife. And the actress pulled it off expertly! I will look her up after I’m done with the body of this post3.
Ironically, another character who doesn’t come across that well is Malcolm Lee.
I learned a lot less about Tae and Eva. I don’t fully understand what Tae did wrong, and there seemed to be some contradictions as to how bad it was. But I can attribute most of that to my divided attention, trying to keep track of all the other characters.
Accessibility: 10/10. So accessible that it adversely affected the quality of the episode. Characters used each other’s names far more often than I’ve ever seen, on television or in real life. This helped me a great deal when circumstances forced me to stop watching the episode in the middle and resume it an hour later, which meant I had to learn everyone’s names again. But that contributed to the writing score above not being as high as it could have been.
Closure: 6/10. Ian has made his decision; he and Camille got closure. Angie and Portia, though, have lost the excellent relationships they thought they had. That’s a form of closure, I suppose, but it feels like their stories are just beginning. And while there’s some closure in the Tae/Eva storyline, it’s undercut by the Angie storyline. You can’t end one plotline with the breaking-off of an engagement, and then five minutes later pretend that getting engaged is the happily-ever-after of another plotline.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s very much not for me. I am not a fan of twenty-something romantic entanglement shows, no matter how well written. But if you like them, give this one a shot. The finale, at least, has a lot to recommend it.
When it comes to verisimilitude, this is not a good start. Who writes a manuscript linearly and sends it immediately without reviewing it for errors?
Why wasn’t he literally the first person to greet her?
Her name is Tashae Henry. She hasn’t been in much yet but I can see her going places.