Crystal Moselle takes the skaters of Skate Kitchen and gives them twelve half-hours to roll around New York in. Little happens and it is a pleasure; the series is warmest when it stops trying to have plots.
Crystal Moselle made Skate Kitchen in 2018 with a group of young women she had found skateboarding in New York, and Betty is her second go at the same people. Five of them come back: Janay (Dede Lovelace), Kirt (Nina Moran), Honeybear (Kabrina Adams), Indigo (Ajani Russell) and Camille (Rachelle Vinberg). Moselle and Lesley Arfin, who created the series with her, have built something that asks almost nothing of you. Each season is six half-hours. There is hardly any plot and a great deal of rolling through Manhattan while the light goes. It is good, small and slightly weightless, and we enjoyed it more than that description suggests.
Nobody in it is a trained actor, and Moselle does not shoot them as if they were. The camera rides low, at hip height, and follows the boards for a block at a time without cutting: through traffic, across subway grates, down into the bowls of the skate parks. The light is mostly late afternoon and mostly real. Aska Matsumiya’s score is soft and electronic and comes up under the skating like a radio left on in the next room. The best passage in the first episode is five girls moving through the city together, and for about a minute we felt seventeen and unsupervised. Then we noticed how carefully the shots had been chosen and liked it no less.
Moran is the reason most people will keep watching. Kirt is loud, permanently stoned and full of theories, and Moran delivers them as if she has only just thought of them, because she probably has. Russell gives Indigo a stillness the others lack; she looks as though she has somewhere better to be and has decided, for now, not to go. Vinberg, who also writes on the series, plays Camille as a girl who would rather the boys respected her than that the girls liked her, and she lets you see what that costs. Adams says least and is watched most; the series is patient with Honeybear in a way television rarely is with quiet people. Lovelace’s Janay carries the heaviest material of the first season, in a storyline we will not describe, and carries it plainly and well.
The trouble comes whenever a half-hour needs a shape. Twelve writers are credited, and when they hand the girls a party, a missing bag or a boy to argue over, the joins show. Scenes end because the episode needs them to rather than because anything has happened. The boys, Philip (Raekwon Haynes) and Charlie (Alexander Cooper) among them, are furniture: there to be skated around or slept with and then forgotten. Some of the improvised talk lands nowhere, and Moselle keeps it anyway. We were, once or twice, mildly bored, and then a board would drop off a kerb into traffic and we forgave everything, which is roughly how the series expects to be treated.
The second season, made in the pandemic, puts masks on everyone and cold in the air, and it is the better of the two for it. The girls have less city to play in and more reason to want each other, and the friendships, which the first season took for granted, are tested by money and small betrayals. It is still a show in which little happens. It just happens to people we had come to mind about.
Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack was about brothers who had grown up barely leaving a flat, and her gift is for watching people without seeming to. Skate Kitchen had a spine the series does not: a mother, a betrayal and ninety minutes to settle them in. Some critics have taken the loss of that spine as a loss of substance, and we see the case. We would put it differently. The film was about a girl finding a group. The series is about the group, and groups do not have plots. They have afternoons.
Watch it an episode at a time, in the evening, with the windows open. Six in a row and the skating starts to look like padding. One a night and it is the thing you tuned in for.
