Awkward

Premise

Social outcast Jenna Hamilton has a freak accident but it is mistaken for a suicide attempt because she had received a harsh "care-frontation" letter suggesting ways on how she could be less unpopular. She begins a blog that helps her deal with various teen issues such as boy troubles, peer pressure, and maintaining friendships. By making changes and embracing her misfortune, she grows up and becomes well known among her peers, for better or worse.

Cast and characters

Ashley Rickards as Jenna Hamilton, the titular "awkward" girl with an irreverent, optimistic outlook on life. The series begins with her receiving a brutal "care-frontation" letter that urges her to become less invisible. Jenna loses her virginity to and has a complicated on-off relationship with Matty McKibben. She is also an aspiring writer. Her best friends are Tamara Kaplan and (in earlier seasons) Ming Huang.

Beau Mirchoff as Matty McKibben, Jenna's main love interest. He initially appears to be a typical popular jock but over the course of the series reveals a deeper, more sensitive side. He struggles when he is out of his comfort zone, as he normally doesn't have to try very hard to be well-liked or accepted. He has a complicated relationship with his parents, and discovered he was adopted mid-series. He later meets his birth father, who, like Jenna's parents, had Matty at a very young age. Matty's best friend is Jake Rosati.

Nikki DeLoach as Lacey Hamilton, Jenna's young, appearance-obsessed mother who had Jenna as a teenager. She secretly wrote Jenna the brutal "care-frontation" letter in an ill-advised attempt to make her daughter more happy and popular. Once revealed, Jenna stopped speaking to her and Jenna's dad, Kevin, moved out of the family home. They later reconciled. She and Jenna seem to be polar opposites at times, but she has displayed genuine love and concern for her throughout the series. Her best friends are Ally Saxton and Val Marks.

Jillian Rose Reed as Tamara Kaplan, Jenna's best friend and a perky, type A personality who is as obsessed with her own brand of slang as she is with becoming popular. Tamara is seen as fun and outgoing but also often bossy and annoying because of her loud antics. A recurring theme of the series is Tamara succeeding much easier at being well-liked (as a cheerleader, then later as Sadie Saxton's friend) than Jenna. Like Jenna, she also tends to lead a disastrous love life.

Brett Davern as Jake Rosati, Matty's best friend and a brief love interest for Jenna. Jake is popular like Matty, but for different reasons; he's the class president, known for his smarts and tends to be well-liked by everyone for his caring nature. Later, Jake and Tamara date but break up over Tamara's personality. Jake goes through identity crises throughout the series, rejecting his goody two-shoes image to become a "cooler" singer and later as a "townie", electing to take a gap year from college to work in Palos Hills. His most frequent love interest is Lissa Miller.

Broadcast

The series premiered on July 19, 2011. MTV renewed the series for a second season on August 24, 2011. The second season premiered on June 28, 2012, at 10:30 pm. Awkward was officially renewed for a third season with an order of 20 episodes on July 25, 2012, which began airing on April 16, 2013, at 10:00 pm. On June 26, 2013, it was announced that the show's creator Lauren Iungerich would be exiting the show after production of season three concluded on June 27, 2013. The rest of the show's third season began airing on October 22, 2013.

MTV renewed the series for a fourth season on August 5, 2013, that premiered on April 15, 2014, with new showrunners, Chris Alberghini and Mike Chessler, to replace creator and former showrunner, Lauren Iungerich.

Awkward's first season was generally well-received with television critics praising the show's realism and writing as well as its central character, and was included in various critics' top ten lists. The show also earned several award nominations, winning one Teen Choice Award and one People's Choice Award.

On October 8, 2014, Awkward was renewed for a fifth and final season, which premiered on August 31, 2015. The mid-season finale aired on November 9, 2015; when the show returned in 2016, the story picked up during the summer after the characters' freshman year of college. The second half of season 5 premiered on March 15, 2016. Producer Chris Alberghini said that there could possibly be a season 6 if MTV decides and that there are more stories to tell. While most cast members agreed that they would happily return if there was a season 6, suggesting that fans should tell MTV if they want more seasons, no further episodes of the series were produced.

Conception

Series creator Lauren Iungerich spent time with actual high school students to elaborate the teen dialogue of the show. She also met them to talk about their lives and to make sure the show reflects the reality. Speaking to the first three seasons' themes, Iungerich said:

The first season is really about identity and an exploration of "Who am I?" through the eyes of Jenna as she's exploring who she is. This season [season 2] the driving theme is, "Who do I want to be with?" and that doesn't just pertain to romantic entanglements but also to friendships and family for everyone. The driving force of Season 3 will be "Who do I want to be?" and making a choice in the decision of identity.

Citing her writing influences, Iungerich said she likes Friday Night Lights: "What Jason Katims did in five seasons was utterly beautiful. The story and who the people truly were came first. That's what I sort of took away from it; to be so bold as to graduate people, and wrap up story lines or allow them to come back in organic ways and to fall in love with the new characters. I want to take a lesson from that. Moving forward, I'm going to take a note from the brave things that he did in that show."

Reception

Critical response

Awkward mostly received positive reviews for its first season. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the TV series received an average score of 74, based on 13 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz explained Awkward is a "series about a high-school girl that's neither maudlin nor alarming nor conceived with intent to preach or to shock. It's further distinguished by its focus on entirely recognizable teenage pains, as endured by an entirely recognizable teenager, Jenna (Ashley Rickards). Its other distinction: strong echoes of an older kind of storytelling, the sort whose characters grow and acquire depth. This is a lot to expect these days from TV writing of any kind, much less a series about teenagers—it's relief enough when it's not about vampires." Hank Stuever of The Washington Post found that series "funny", which was "a pleasant surprise from MTV, the maker of so many lame teen comedies that I've lost count". The New York Times called Awkward as "a wry show about longing—for love, certainly, but also for consistency, that great intangible in the ever-morphing world of high school life". John Kubicek of BuddyTV website wrote "Just like Easy A, Mean Girls or other strong, female-centric teen comedies, Awkward has a quick wit and a very distinct vision of the world. It's the perfect blend of comedy and painful teenage awkwardness, and in the end, the title says it all." He concluded "The result is one of the most enjoyable and earnest teen comedies TV has produced". Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, David Wiegand described the show as "a very smart mix of realism and satirical exaggeration" and praised the writing for being sharp. Curt Wagner of RedEye stated Awkward is "whip-smart and hilarious" while lauding the sharpness of the writing, stating: "With the right amount of exaggerated realism, creator Lauren Iungerich turns all the yearning, pain and, well, awkwardness of high school into a frothy, funny satire that should make anyone feel better about their own fumbling ways."

The New York Post writer Linda Stasi gave the show a three stars rating out of four commenting "aside from the gratuitous sexual stuff, Awkward is a really good, funny, fun show". However, Stasi mentioned "this just isn't the kind of thing you'd want to watch with your kids—nor want your kids to watch". According to The Philadelphia Daily News, "Awkward, like Glee, deals gently and semicomically with issues of sexuality and bullying but never really draws blood". HitFix's Daniel Fienberg gave the show a B rating commenting "Not only are high school horrors pretty universal, even if the specifics change, but I can find a way to fit Awkward into a tradition of hyper-literal high school comedies like Pretty in Pink or Heathers or Mean Girls or Juno. It's not as good as any of those, but it's not as bad as Jawbreaker, which is in the same tradition." Variety's Brian Lowry was less enthusiastic about the show: "While the premise is refreshingly gimmick-free compared with RJ Berger or Teen Wolf, the situations aren't compelling enough to make this much more than a latter-day Doogie Howser, M.D. with a gender switch."

Critics' top ten lists

Following its first season, Awkward was included in various critics' top ten lists.

The Daily Beast (unranked list)

The Huffington Post (unranked alphabetical list)

IMDb (unranked list)

The New York Daily News (unranked list)

The New York Times (unranked alphabetical list)