Veronica West is interested in women trying to understand themselves while controlling what others see. We value the friendships she and Sarah Kucserka build in High Fidelity, though its central character spends too long revisiting the same doubts.
Fi1m perspective
In the record shop in High Fidelity (2020), the people are good enough company that Rob need not always be the centre of attention. Creators Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka are most persuasive when they let that group spend time together. We enjoyed those friendships because the supporting cast made the shop feel worth returning to, even when Rob’s uncertainty had begun to wear. That is a modest pleasure, and a substantial part of what makes a television comedy work.
Before co-creating High Fidelity, West wrote and worked as a story editor on Ugly Betty (2006), then took writing and producing roles on dramas and procedurals. Her work with Kucserka on the gender-swapped adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel marked the move into creating and running a series. She went on to create Surface (2022), a psychological thriller with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and a memory-loss premise. The genres differ, but her interest in women trying to understand themselves, including the parts they conceal from other people, remains recognisable.
The strength of High Fidelity is how well that interest fits Zoë Kravitz’s performance as Rob. She suggests hurt without asking us to stop noticing how carefully Rob presents herself. West and Kucserka want the uncertainty to engage us without costing Rob her appeal, and Kravitz is persuasive enough to make that difficult arrangement work for a while.
The difficulty is sustaining it across ten episodes. Rob’s uncertainty receives more attention than its development can support, leaving the central story less convincing than the friendships around it. We would like West to give those other people more room, since the shop already contains enough lively company to make an agreeable comedy without quite so much concentration on Rob. Start with High Fidelity for Kravitz and the ensemble, with patience for a central story that does not repay all the time spent on it.
Biography
Veronica West (née Becker) is an American television writer and producer. She is from Tucson, Arizona, and graduated from Northwestern University.
West began her career writing for series including Ugly Betty (2006–2008, as Veronica Becker), for which the writing staff received a Writers Guild of America Award in 2007. She has written episodes of Brothers & Sisters, Chicago Fire, Bull, Dexter: New Blood and others. She co-created and served as showrunner on the Hulu series High Fidelity (2020) with Sarah Kucserka, and created and showran the Apple TV+ series Surface (2022).
