From the channel that brought you The Beautiful Life: TBL now comes another show with a crappy title. Life Unexpected, which formally went by the name LUX (get it?) and before that Parental Discretion Advised and before that Light Years, and was more recently also promoted as Life UneXpected. If you think it sounds like they spent more time rewriting the title than the script, then you are probably right. None of these titles really make sense, sure one of the characters is called Lux, but Light Years makes it sound sci-fi and Life Unexpected is just a lie, this was one of the most predictable shows I have seen this season. But maybe I am not the key audience, after all this is the brain child of the folks who brought you the Gilmore Girls
OK so this is the story. Lux has been shifted around foster homes for 15 years and as she is tuning 16 she wants to get legally emancipated, however to do this she has to get her birth parents to sign some bit of paper. So she wanders down to the local bar to find her Dad, Nate, who had no idea she even existed. They bond over YouTube clips before tracking down her mum, Cate, who has just got engaged to her on-air morning radio co-host. Lux gets her papers signed by both parents and goes to court where the renegade judge decides she is not ready for emancipation and instead puts her into the custody of her birth mum who gets up at 4am to do a radio show and her birth father who works till 4am at his bar. Neither of them asked for this, so of course the parents aren’t happy, but after some arguing they have crazy wild sex before Cate goes back to her fiancée and says her daughter is moving in with them.
There must have been some sort of out cry by foster parents in Oregon who seem to all hate children… or love them to much. Seriously 7 abusive foster parents? Can’t this kid catch a break? There also must have been about 3 albums worth of music in this show. Sure the characters speak in an on the nose over explainy way, but do we need 30 different indie guys singing with their guitars to demonstrate this is an emotional moment? As the show moves forward we know Nate and Cate should get together, or at very least Cate (who seemed to learn nothing about unprotected sex since high school (yes I release Nate should know too, but in fairness, last time he thought she got an abortion, obviously the fact she disappeared for 9 months wasn’t a clue)) needs to be dumped by her fiancée.
The series already has an order for 13 episodes and again they go crazy with titles in that weird American obsession with title themes way (Friends for example was always “The One…”, Scrubs was “My…”, Smallville episodes are all one word titles (except the most recent episode “Absolute Justice” – that’s right, back off nerds), or The L word, where all the titles begin with an “L”). All the titles in Life Unexpected are “xxxx xxxxed” or when then they can “xxxx unxxxed”, you see it is like the title – we be clever little writers!
Written by: Liz Tigelaar
Directed by: Gary Flede
Starring: Brittany Robertson, Shiri Appleby, Kristoffer Polaha, Kerr Smith, Reggie Austin
Date premièred: 18th January 2010
UK Details: TBC
