Stream It Or Skip It: ‘American Princess’ On Lifetime, Jenji Kohan’s Dramedy About A Socialite Running Away To A Renaissance Faire

Ever been to a Renaissance Festival, affectionately (or not) nicknamed the “ren faire”? People in baroque costumes, speaking like they live in Elizabethan times, and visitors in fanny packs eating giant turkey legs. Every summer there’s one in just about every wooded area in the country, but there has never been a show about what goes on behind the scenes. But Jenji Kohan can’t resist looking at little-explored subcultures, and she has put her stamp on Jamie Denbo’s series American Princess. Read on for more…

AMERICAN PRINCESS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup of a young woman talking about how she’s planned on her dream wedding forever and how she just had to find the right guy.

The Gist: Amanda Klein (Georgia Flood) is saying this speech — her vows — to a manicurist. She’s having that dream wedding in the country in upstate New York, despite the protestations of Erin (Sas Goldberg), her sister and maid of honor. She’s so connected as an Upper East Side socialite that even Gwyneth Paltrow is coming.

But on her wedding day, she gets a butt-dialed FaceTime from her fiance that shows something odd. She gets on the “Consciously Coupled” tricycle the two were going to ride in to his cabin to find him getting a blowjob from what looks like a hooker. She pushes the woman, who hits her head, bites off a piece of her tongue, and spits blood onto Amanda’s wedding dress.

She takes off on the trike and stumbles upon what she thinks is a theme wedding, where Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare are holding court. After pounding down homemade Scotch and a lot of mead, and drunkenly correcting the actor playing Shakespeare, she passes out. She wakes up in the RV of David Poland (Lucas Neff), who is a “Rennie,” a guy who works full time at the renaissance fair she stumbled into; he’s one of the “mud men” who do shows full of fart jokes and pretend peeing.

He brings her to work the next day and, though she doubts the passion people who work and go to the faire have at first, she meets people like “wash wench” Delilah (Mary Hollis Inboden), who came for a day and never left, who takes an immediate shine to Amanda. Even people she’s doesn’t quite get along with, like Maggie (Seana Kofoed), who has played Elizabeth for decades or her obsequious, Shakespeare-playing bestie Brian (Rory O’Malley), she starts to realize she should take a chance and stay there instead of going back to her “almost perfect” life.

Our Take: Jamie Denbo has written and performed comedy for over 20 years, and her experience shows as the creator and writer of American Princess. But the show definitely has the stamp of Jenji Kohan, her fellow executive producer, for whom Denbo has worked for on both Weeds and Orange Is The New Black. Like Kohan’s more recent shows — GLOW is included in this list — a woman who is from one world finds herself in an environment that is foreign to her. But she finds something about that world appealing, especially because the people in it are exactly the opposite of the people in her life, with whom she’s become disillusioned. As the woman gets more involved in this new environment, we see stories involving the other characters, building out a whole world of potential story lines and ideas.

There’s nothing in particular about American Princess that would give us any pause; it just depends on if you’re into what goes on behind the scenes of the ren faire that comes to your local woodland area every summer. Like GLOW and OITNB, your enjoyment of the series depends wholly on the characters and actors that populate the world Kohan and Denbo have set up. And, after watching the first two episodes, it feels like they’re on their way to creating yet another fun ensemble dramedy.

We like Georgia Flood as Amanda, who all the nuttiness revolves around. Sometimes that central character gets to just be the straight person for everyone else’s quirks. But we’ve seen enough nuttiness from Amanda to hope she finds something at the ren faire that she didn’t get with her bitter sister and constantly-high mother Joanntha (Lesley Ann Warren). We’ve enjoyed Neff ever since Raising Hope, and he shows a lot as the “rennie” with a double major and a nipple ring who doesn’t quite know what to think of the “stray” he brought into this world. And Imboden is gleefully enthusiastic as Delilah, who can’t hide her love for her work or for the straight-as-an-arrow Amanda.

Sex and Skin: We see Amanda’s fiance’s tush as he’s getting that blowjob, and there are some other bare tushes here and there. In the second episode, we also learn that there’s a particular stump that people have relations on.

Parting Shot: The woman that Amanda pushed is in the hospital. One nurse tells the other that she had a card that says she’s a “Ye Olde Lord Executioner.” As we found out earlier, that’s a role in the ren faire. Uh oh. The last scene is the woman opening her eyes.

Sleeper Star: Here’s a good spot to mention that, in episode 2, the show quickly veers away from Amanda, who’s busy trying to find the best job for herself at the faire. We see David trying to figure out how to treat the torn nipple Amanda caused in another drunken stumble the night before. But we also see a lot of Maggie and Brian, who have to navigate the return of an old flame of Maggie’s, played by guest John Ross Bowie. That story took two characters that we thought were going to be cartoons and made them more real, just like we’d expect from a Kohan show these days.

Most Pilot-y Line: Not so much a line, but the sequence where the drunken, depressed Amanda keeps confusing the faire’s closing ceremony of the day with a theme wedding went on far too long and almost made us fall asleep. That could have gotten to the point a whole lot faster.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Kohan has a way of making fringe-y worlds interesting via the characters she and her collaborators create. And American Princess is no exception.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream American Princess on Lifetime