COLLEGE WEEK: Why Felicity’s College Years Were Much Better Than Mine

On September 28, 1998, The WB network premiered a show called Felicity. Some four weeks earlier, I stepped into my own college dorm room for the first time, beginning that most ballyhooed of times, the College Years. Felicity lasted exactly four seasons before going to the TV graveyard (cause of death: a haircut maybe?), and since I graduated on time, that means Felicity and I essentially went to college together. Only her college experience was just so much better than mine. For so many reasons.

In the first five minutes of the pilot, Palo Alto teen Felicity Porter graduates with honors, finally got the nerve to talk to the boy she liked, read too much into what he wrote in her yearbook, and then completely changed her Stanford plans in order to cross the country and follow Ben to the fictional University of New York. By the end of the pilot, she’s already thinking about dropping pre-med in order to study art.

Felicity  was the perfect college show, full stop, but that pilot was something truly special. And this was back before we knew that shows that emerged from territory that wasn’t a major broadcast network or HBO. If Felicity premiered today, in this era of Difficult Men and bloated single-story streaming shows and murder disguised as portent, I would embrace it with open arms and eyes full of tears. And I wouldn’t be alone. That’s how much a show like this is needed in the TV landscape. Even from its perch on the lowly WB (where Buffy  and Dawson’s Creek had only just begun to give that netlet a little bit of status, Felicity instantly made Keri Russell a star.

That perfect little pilot set up the perfect college story — and a perfectly relatable one for me. The bigger deal is made (by Felicity’s parents, at least) that she’s giving up Stanford, one of the most prestigious schools in the country. For me personally, the bigger deal was that Stanford was in her home town of Palo Alto. I opted to stay in my hometown for college. As the years have gone on, the yearning “I shoulda gone to NYU” inside me has only grown more resolute, and I’m pretty sure it’s Felicity that put it there.

Executive producers J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves (it’s still so weird that the guys behind The Force Awakens and Cloverfield started off with this decidedly terrestrial story) did a great job making their particular version of New York City look so appealing. Between the Dean and DeLucas (a coffee shop I was certain was created for the show) to those perfect Snuffy Walden music cues, everything seems so romantic and autumnal and perfect. And divorced from reality in the best ways. It’s somehow sweater weather in New York City on the first weekend of college? What a beautiful universe Felicity lives in.

Throughout the course of the series, Felicity kept making me jealous. Angsty love triangles with cute boys and cavernous dorm rooms? I had neither of those. Hell, I’d have put up with four years of awful Julie in order to have that kind of college experience. Felicity ditched Julie after two and a half years.

By the time Felicity Porter graduated from the University of New York, she’d been through sex, death, a Twilight Zone-inspired black-and-white episode (this show did not get enough credit for its creativity), any number of Ben-for-Ben boyfriend swaps, Tyra Banks, and a final-season time-travel storyline after the show ended up with a bigger episode order than it expected for its final season. My college experience had neither Tyra Banks nor time travel. Game: Felicity.

[You can stream Felicity on Hulu.]