April Blair’s high-school drama moves a Crenshaw footballer into a Beverly Hills house and gets a great deal right about the journey between the two, and Daniel Ezra is a real find. The football, oddly, is the weakest thing in it.
Spencer James (Daniel Ezra) is the best player on his school team in Crenshaw, and Billy Baker (Taye Diggs), who coaches at Beverly Hills High, wants him. The offer comes with a spare bedroom in Baker’s house, because the rules require an address in the district, and so Spencer spends his weekdays among people whose problems come with a pool. April Blair created the series and Spencer Paysinger, whose own life it draws on, is among its writers. The pitch is The O.C. with the class line drawn in black and white, and the series knows it and does not apologise.
We would put it in the good-if-the-genre-is-yours column, and we mean that more warmly than it sounds. What it does well is the journey between the two houses. Spencer on the bus home, changing how he stands as the neighbourhoods change. The difference in what a knock at the door means in each place. Karimah Westbrook, as his mother Grace, has the hardest job in the cast, which is to be the person he lies to so she will not worry, and to let us see her not believing a word. The scene that got us was not on any pitch. It was Spencer home for a weekend, telling Grace that everything was fine, and Westbrook looking at him for a second too long before agreeing that it was. We were moved, and it was a small thing, and that is why.
Ezra is the reason to stay. His American accent never slips, and he plays Spencer as a boy who has learned to read a room before he enters it, so that his silences in Beverly Hills mean something different from his silences at home. Bre-Z, as Coop, carries the Crenshaw strand almost alone once Spencer has gone, and the series is honest enough to notice that the friend left behind has the more dangerous story. Chelsea Tavares, as Patience, gives that strand somewhere to go. Diggs plays Billy with a coach’s easy warmth and something held back behind it; the series has a secret about him, and we will not go near it.
The Beverly Hills teenagers are drawn from stock. Jordan (Michael Evans Behling) is the coach’s son with everything to prove, Olivia (Samantha Logan) is the sister with a past, Layla (Greta Onieogou) is the girl with the big empty house, Asher (Cody Christian) is the rival. The actors are likeable and the writing gives each of them a crisis per episode and then hurries on to the next. Most critics have noticed this. It is the cost of a first season with 16 hours to fill and a large cast to keep employed, and it never quite goes away.
Then there is the football. Every match is cut the same way: slow motion, a close-up of a face under a helmet, the crowd noise rising, a catch. We never know where the ball is, how much time is left, or why this play matters more than the last one. For a series about a footballer, the football is the least persuasive thing in it. We were bored during the games and then irritated by being bored, because everything either side of them is done with care.
The directing rota is long, as it is on any series of this length, and includes Rose Troche and Rob Hardy; Ezra and Westbrook both direct episodes themselves. Whoever is in the chair, the house style holds: bright interiors, clean light, nobody ever shot in shadow unless the script requires a bad decision. It runs to eight seasons and 132 episodes, at 43 minutes each, and the first season is the tightest of them.
Start with that first season. If the family scenes hold you, there is a great deal more waiting. If you have come for the football, you will find it is on most weekends and is better photographed.
