Spoilers for Rise and Spring Awakening lie within, obviously
To preface this review: I’m a Spring Awakening fan, for better or for worse (though it’s mostly the latter).
I own Steven Sater’s Purple Summer lyrical annotation book, a physical copy of the musical script, and three different translations of the original German play. I’ve run a Spring Awakening twitter account for the last three years, I self-describes as a “professional [Deaf West’s Spring Awakening] fan” in my twitter bio, and My Junk is my ringtone. No matter how much I whine and deny it, I actually like Spring Awakening, somewhere deep inside. So, it’s pretty obvious why I decided to bite the bullet and watch NBC’s Rise, despite my own worries about the content; going into Rise, my expectations were incredibly low due to a variety of things–the straightwashing of the character made to represent Lou Volpe and the way the trailers only marketed the relationship between Lilette (Auli’i Cravalho, Wendla in the Show-Within-The-Show) and Robbie (Damon J. Gillespie, Melchior in the Show-Within-The-Show) were at the top of the list–but whenever I expressed these doubts, a Rise fan would appear out of the ether to tell me to give the show a try! before I judged it.
So I did! I watched the entirety of season one of Rise in less than 24 hours and livetweeted the entire thing and, to be completely honest, I’m merely more angry for it.
Rise wasn’t renewed for a second season, and most of the tweets and posts about this reference it being a travesty because “Representation matters!” As a black, non-binary, bisexual person, I generally agree with this, but I think one of the complexities that many Rise fans seem to miss is that just having representation isn’t enough: It has to be good.
My experience with Rise, the reason that I’d give it a solid 4/10, is that it’s a show of missed opportunities. You spend the entire time waiting for the show to, pardon the pun, rise to its potential; the actors are great, the setting is interesting, the concept is good, but the writing and the characterwork fall short. Robbie being pulled into the world of acting and having to juggle that against football and his father’s expectations could be intriguing, but it’s never truly, deeply explored. Lilette’s struggles with poverty, her mother, work, slutshaming, and the race and gender dynamics that should be affecting her through all of those things are all very interesting things, but the show physically didn’t have the space or time to deal with any of those aspects adequately, leading to them being shoved in where they could fit in a way that did a disservice to every aspect of her character. I could go on to any character–Gwen, Simon, Michael, Sasha, Tracey, Maashous, Gordy–and with every one I could name a way their story and characterization suffered because NBC tried to shove in as many “representative” storylines possible, and in the process made all their representation–except for maybe Simon’s–seem messy and bad.
I think this shows most with Michael’s storyline, and I know, I’m trans so of course I would latch onto the faults in the trans storyline but when the trans character’s storyline revolves entirely around 1. having people be transphobic towards him, 2. making other main characters look good by letting them reprimand transphobic people, and 3. acting as a prop in the shoehorned teen pregnancy plot, so it’s pretty hard to find things to be happy about. I mean, for sure, Rise hired a trans actor to play a trans role! They did the bare minimum that any show should do, but not many do it so we should be grateful, right? But it’s a little hard when we don’t get to see Michael perform until the penultimate episode, when his role as Moritz is almost never discussed, when nearly every conversation he has with Sasha has an insidious undertone of “Like, yeah, Michael is trans but he doesn’t have it that bad,“ including one conversation where Sasha all but says that aloud. Michael plays one of the main characters of the Show-Within-The-Show (Michael is cast as sad soulful sleepyhead, Moritz Stiefel), the one who arguably has the most modernly pertinent storyline in Spring Awakening, and yet is pushed to the outskirts of the show; Moritz is not even mentioned for the majority of the show, and we only get to watch Michael onstage acting three times, in the final episode, despite NBC making their viewers watch the Wendla and Melchior beating scene seven times.
And all this talk about missed opportunities ignores one of the shows main issues: it’s utterly unlikable main character. I think I almost exclusively referred to Lou Mazzuchelli as “Douchebag director” throughout my livetweeting of the show, and it’s not just because I was upset that he was straightwashed. No, Lou “Mazzu” Mazzuchelli had a moment in every single episode where he said something inconsiderate to a marginalized person; whether it was him implying that he deserved the directing job more than the woman of color with more experience and knowledge than him, or him comparing a student’s fear of his parents hearing that he was gay to his own fear of doing a controversial show, or him telling a bunch of teenagers that they have to “put aside [their] complaints about having to practice late” during midterm season, or him saying that a black football player has never had to work for anything in his life,or-
I could go on.
The point is, when you look up the writers of this, it’s clear why the show is Like This; why they don’t go deep into those storylines, why they live in a world with ample transphobia and homophobia but the racism that half the cast must face (That obviously shapes the way Tracey is seen by her coworkers) is never brought up, why Lou is so damn terrible when he’s supposed to be the one you root for: no matter how much diversity arrows you shoot at the target, if they’re all shot by cis, white, straight men and women, they’re not likely to hit the target.
I can complain forever about this, and I did both in my livetweet thread and after finishing Rise, but the point is that NBC Rise had a lot of potential. The cast was great, the acting was great, the singing was great, the plot was great, but the lack of real depth and true work into making their diversity more than just a buzzword hurt the show. It wasn’t terrible, not the worst thing I’ve ever watched by far, but I spent the whole time waiting for something more: for the narrative to really connect to the characters, for it to critique some of the messed up things that the characters did or said, for anything that would make me really care about these characters and this town and the plotline, but it didn’t deliver. And Rise, which held so much potential, ended up being just as disappointing to me as Steven Sater’s original misogynistic and homophobic vision for Spring Awakening.
The Salt Squad 