‘Praise Petey’ Is An Unexpected Champion of Women in Journalism

“Female journalists have ethics. This isn’t another case of the 2011 Chris Evans GQ article.”

As the debut season of Freeform’s delightful animated series Praise Petey comes to an end, it’s time to reflect on its greatest episode, which came early in the season and proved that the show understands big-city journalism on a personal level. 

The show is created by comedian and former Reductress editor Anna Drezen and features an all-star cast, including Annie Murphy, John Cho, and Kiersey Clemons. 

Petey (Murphy) is introduced in the first episode as a “senior assistant editorial assistant” at a major fashion company in the Big Apple. In a montage, she’s shown drinking coffee, eating salads and dodging “piss-bottles” on the subway on the daily — which, well… checks out — before her so-called glamorous lifestyle comes to a halt.

Petey discovers that her longtime boyfriend, a plank of wood, is cheating on her with her best friend and she gets fired for acting foolish during a business meeting. 

Around the same time, Petey meets with her socialite mother (Christine Baranski) who gives her a VHS tape that contains a message from her dead father, which reveals that she has inherited a small-town in West Carolina called New Utopia.

With nothing left going for her in NYC, Petey relocates and finds that the town is actually a deeply disturbing cult that worships her father and believes that, one day, they will embark on a magical comet trip that will bring them to another half of the universe. The town is struggling financially and has some deeply-rooted misogyny, and Petey makes it her responsibility to fix things up, tackling one issue at a time. 

In Episode 4, called “Father’s Knee”, Petey discovers that her father ran the town’s only magazine and news source, which he filled with “Boomer nonsense.” She decides to revive the magazine and sets out to write a compelling profile on the town’s lovable outcast Bandit (Cho) after he tries to convince her that bringing back the magazine is a bad idea.

Though, Petey runs into a few conflicts as the characters have a fantastic “will-they-won’t-they” dynamic coupled with mouth-watering unresolved sexual tension. When the local barkeep Eliza (Clemons) points this out, Petey denies the chemistry. “Female journalists have ethics. This isn’t another case of the 2011 Chris Evans GQ article,” she says in reference to a real-life, iconic-yet-polarizing profile on the Marvel star, which some man at Los Angeles Times deemed “the worst celebrity profile ever” as the journalist admittedly got drunk with the actor and forgot to note important details. 

Later in the episode, Petey pulls a sneaky trick on Bandit, who knows she’s visiting him at his barn for journalism purposes. He claims that he was banished from the cult for being “handsome” and then he moved to NYC and suffered a brain injury which caused him to forget his new path as a doctor, thus resulting in his return. But, Petey already knows the truth behind Bandit’s hatred for the cult as she found a secret file and video of the local townsman who was deemed “too ugly” by her father to be banished. 

She reveals her tape recorder and presses him on the truth, and he panics. Bandit tells her “this is off the record,” and she explains “oh sweetie, you have to say that before you start crying” – at which point, I stood up from my couch and pointed to my TV, and screamed “Yes!” 

By the end of the episode, Petey realizes that exposing Bandit’s secrets isn’t something that her audience would benefit from and, instead, she publishes a personal essay and promises more to come. “I hope you learn a little bit about me, but also, I hope you learn a little bit about yourselves,” she writes. And while the character didn’t stick to her guns with this story, Petey did something greater. She established herself to be smarter than the fumbling, “look-at-me” editorial assistant she was in NYC.

And Drezen, episode writer Rachel Hastings, and the entire writers team set new standards for depicting journalism on television with an episode that packs in journalistic lingo, underground references, and an exciting journey culminating in Petey proving to the patriarchal society that women can be bad-ass journalists, too.

The first season of Praise Petey ran for 10 episodes, with the finale airing August 18, 2023 on Freeform. The series streams on Hulu.