Commentary

@SummerBreak is #Bland

Like many other self-deluded old people, I like to think that I remain very much on the cutting edge of youth culture. I hashtag my handwritten personal correspondence. I describe sneakers and stair lifts alike as "swaggy." I know with 82.5 percent certainty that Macklemore is a person who has a song. If something is cool or #awesome, there's a good chance I'll get hip to it four days sooner than my parents will.

Despite my vague familiarity with all things Abercrombie, I still don't buy anything about @SummerBreak, AT&T's PG-rated, hyper-Instagrammable knockoff of The Real World. Since its debut a month ago, @SummerBreak has been doing its part to fill the summer content and activity voids. In the absence of movies, TV series, streamables, carnivals, fairs, concerts, summer stock and sets of written, printed or blank sheets bound together into a volume ("books"), @SummerBreak has boldly - nay, bravely! - rained a superstorm of social media upon the understimulated 12-24 demographic.

There are tweets. There are Tumblrs. There are short videos and there are long videos. It is immersive, relentless and bland as cement.

Here's the central mistake @SummerBreak makes: It assumes the kids today, with the hair and the multitasking and the untamable YOLO spirit, would rather watch a bunch of other kids document their sporadically mirthful adventures than document their own. While my current interaction with teenagers doesn't extend beyond trying not to act weird or pervy while I walk home the nice baby-sitter from across the street, nothing depicted in or by the show ("show" probably isn't the right descriptor, but "content slagheap" doesn't roll off the tongue) is especially far removed from the average's teen experience. Teens go camping. They flirt. They express mild worry about the future before realizing that, hey, we're young and techno-enabled and have nice facial bone structure.

So it falls on the cast to distinguish the entire endeavor and, alas, its members aren't up to the task. Indeed, they're plucked from teen-reality central casting. There's the Hustla (Ray, all tank tops and unisyllabic Pacino cadence), the Blonde (Alex, who has blonde hair), the Other Blonde (Lena, who also has blonde hair) and the Typo (Zaq, whose defining trait is his susceptibility to boat-sickness). They act like a bunch of 17-year-olds - which is to say, they're likably benign idiots. In and of itself, that doesn't make them entertaining to watch.

And while I recognize that online video plays by brands other than Axe can only push the envelope so far, kids reared on "The Real World," "Jersey Shore" and other make-old-people-fear-for-the-future-of-western-civilization reality shows are likely to be turned off by the PG nature of the proceedings. The @SummerBreak kids might drink and/or sport Chinese-language character tattoos that don't mean what they think it does ("licker of noses"), but the booze is cloaked behind omnipresent red Solo cups and the tats are obscured by clothing. Even the language sounds oddly clipped: In the face of a recalcitrant car trunk, one of the gals exclaims, "It's still not opening, ho." In the wake of a furniture malfunction, another quips, "Chair down, bitch." Bleepably memorable, this ain't.

An aside: Has any comely-young-people-lumped-together show participant ever flashed an on-camera pimple? Whiteheads = truth.

Along those lines, it doesn't help that numerous @SummerBreak sequences feel staged for the cameras. Nobody expects cinema-verité authenticity from this genre, but even by the "can you try that again, but with more menacing finger jabs?" standards of shows that came before, something is a little off here. At one point, one of the gals butters us up for a segue by stating, out of nowhere, "I wonder what the boys are doing now." Similarly, in one of this week's clips, a dad gives his so-darn-proud-of-you-son speech to one of the kids (who's departing for college) in full view of the rest of the cast. Few, if any, notes ring true.

Meanwhile, what AT&T gets out of this sponsorship is anybody's guess. @SummerBreak features roughly 32 instances of phone usage per minute, but the activities depicted - social mediafying, shooting photos, filming video "confessionals," employing its reflective surface to check out one's coif - can be performed on just about any other device on any other network. The series, then, is as much an advertisement for the mobile biz as a whole as it is for AT&T. On the plus side, the company can expect a nice thank-you fruit basket from the always-gracious folks at Verizon Wireless.

I applaud @SummerBreak's ambition, as molding this untamed blob of content into something vaguely watchable is no simple task. But in the end, the same hyperconnectedness that it celebrates in its target audience is what dooms it. Thanks to that hyperconnectedness, this audience has seen everything here before, usually rendered much more salaciously. Factor in the cast-charisma void, and @SummerBreak doesn't even ascend to the level of passable down-time diversion. Really, if a [mumbles into fist]-year-old with sprouts of ear hair can see through this thing, it's worrying to think how it might be received by consumers who actually matter.

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