'Betty' Is One of TIME's 50 Most Underappreciated Shows
Time · LC · trust 23/100
In the canon of teen entertainment, boys tend to make mischief while girls give each other makeovers. One great pleasure of Betty —creator Crystal Moselle’s expansion of her 2018 indie feature Skate Kitchen —is how it defies that binary simply by ignoring it. Fictionalizing the adventures of a real, all-female New York City skateboard crew, whose members also dominated its cast, the show luxuriates in images of girls bonding (and sometimes beefing) through roguish behavior: daredevil skating, drug experimentation, picking fights, chasing love interests of one gender or another. Betty defies genre; while episodes run half an hour and the banter can be hilarious, many of the situations and themes it touches, from race and class privilege to sexual assault, are quite serious. Moselle’s dreamy style allows these seemingly disparate elements to melt together in generous, wordless skate-park footage, as fluid and kinetic as a sunny afternoon spent wandering the Lower East Side with a pack of friends and no particular agenda. For New Yorkers who love it, the show holds special meaning because it debuted in the long lockdown spring of 2020 and gave back to us a vision of a vibrant city we missed terribly. Yet you don’t have to know the street corners where artsy lovergirl Honeybear (Kabrina “Moonbear” Adams) and goofy, pugnacious Kirt (Nina Moran) lean against hydrants to appreciate the magic of Betty . At its core, it’s a celebration of youthful freedom, and that’s universal.
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