Lesley Arfin writes young women who make mistakes and do not learn from them, then lets the camera follow them home. In Betty the result is small, warm and almost plotless, and better than that sounds.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in every episode of Betty (2020) five young women push off down a Manhattan street and the series simply goes with them while the light fades. Nobody says anything that matters. There is nowhere in particular to arrive. That is Lesley Arfin's idea of a scene, and we enjoyed those stretches far more than a description of them suggests, because she and Crystal Moselle trust that five friends killing an afternoon is enough to watch, and for six half-hours a season it is.
She came to television from print, and it shows. She began at Vice in 2001, and the column she wrote there became the book Dear Diary in 2007. The voice in it was confessional, first person, unbothered about looking good. Television took her on in 2012 as a staff writer on Girls, then on Awkward and Brooklyn Nine-Nine between 2013 and 2014, where she wrote a first-season Halloween episode alone. In 2016 she co-created Love with Paul Rust, her regular writing partner, and Judd Apatow, and ran it until 2018. Betty followed in 2020, with Arfin as showrunner for the first season.
What she is after is fairly consistent. Her characters are flawed and stay flawed; the mistakes do not come with lessons attached. "I’m interested in seeing women who make mistakes and, like, don’t learn a lesson from it," she told Vogue in 2016, and the women of Betty are the clearest case we have reviewed. Nobody is a heroine, nobody is a villain, nobody is anyone's mother. The comedy comes from awkwardness rather than jokes, the kind that makes you shift on the sofa. Love is where most critics locate her best writing about relationships and the untidiness of being thirty, and Dear Diary is where they find the seed of it, though we can only speak first-hand for Betty.
The strength and the weakness are the same thing. Arfin writes drift well and plot badly, and when Betty tries to give its skaters a storyline the warmth goes out of it. Her early work has dated references and language that have drawn comment since, and the diary voice can read as thin when it has nothing to push against. Moselle gives her real skaters and real streets, which is the best thing that has happened to her writing: it grounds people who might otherwise float away.
Do not turn up to a Lesley Arfin series for the story. Turn up for the hour after school when nobody has anywhere to be, and stay for the light.
Biography
Lesley Arfin is an American writer and producer. Born on 8 March 1979 in New York City, she began her career contributing to Vice magazine and published the memoir Dear Diary in 2007.
She wrote for the HBO series Girls (2012) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013). With Paul Rust and Judd Apatow she co-created the Netflix series Love (2016–2018). Arfin wrote and executive produced the first season of the HBO series Betty (2020).
She is married to actor and writer Paul Rust.
