Reality has already laid out their paths for them, but Tegan and Sara don’t know that yet at this point in time, and High School isn’t eager to rush them there.
Tegan and sarah youtube series#
To start, the series takes the subtler approach of weaving their influences into the plot: The girls dance in the living room to Hole, watch Bjork get interviewed on TV, rock out at a Green Day concert. By the end of episode three (out of eight total for the season), the Quins haven’t so much as picked up a guitar. On the contrary, when we follow Sara to a piano lesson, the teacher winces at her atrocious, unpracticed playing. Sara discovers drugs and falls in with a couple of rebels from drama class, while Tegan discovers she really, really likes hanging out with her new bestie, the appealingly brash Maya (Amanda Fix).Įventually, of course, we know their paths will converge around music, though High School sidesteps the usual overwrought clichés about prodigies clearly destined for musical stardom.
It also, crucially, forces us to regard Sara and Tegan as separate entities than as a singular set of twins, at exactly the time that they’re starting to explore who they might be apart. But the structure allows us to see what these characters can’t, to understand where certain people are coming from even if - as in the case of a segment about Phoebe’s perspective on her friendship turned romance with Sara, woven through with her fear of being found out for dating a girl - they seem reluctant to explain it for themselves. The stories contained in these halves are often ones shot through with loneliness and anxiety, as characters struggle to understand what’s changed in their relationships or withdraw into themselves rather than open up to their loved ones. More than a gimmick, the bifurcation is key to High School‘s rare emotional sensitivity. For instance, when Sara and Tegan call their mother Simone (Cobie Smulders) from a house party in the first half of the second episode, we’ll get to see Simone’s side of the call, including the stressful day that led up to it, in the second. The not-quite-twist is that the stories typically overlap in time, intersecting here and there as they go. Every half-hour installment is split in two, with each half following a different character. The show’s real masterstroke, however, is its structure.
Neither Tegan nor Sara is much given to over-explaining themselves, but Seazynn Gilliland can speak volumes with Sara’s tired glance and Railey Gilliland with Tegan’s flirtatious giggle. The Gilliland sisters match that care with precise performances of their own - they’re first-time actors who were discovered by the Quin sisters on TikTok, although you wouldn’t know it from their naturalistic performances, or their effortless charisma. It certainly notices when Sara stubbornly refuses to look at Tegan because she’s mad, or when Tegan clocks the unwritten hierarchies that guide the school’s social scene. The camera seems to recognize when Tegan or Sara have crushes before they themselves do, lingering on the back of one classmate’s head or leaning into another’s smile.
Showrunners Clea DuVall (who also directed the first three episodes that screened at TIFF) and Laura Kittrell have an eye for tiny details that define the girls’ interior arcs and the intersections between them. Sara’s started ditching Tegan in favor of more time with her best friend, Phoebe (Olivia Rouyre), and the more Sara pulls away, the more tightly Tegan seems to cling, prompting Sara to pull away more firmly still. More challenging, though, is the distance that’s sprung up between them over the summer. Practically speaking, they’re starting grade ten at a new school in suburban Calgary, away from all the kids they’ve grown up with. Set in the mid-’90s, as indicated by pitch-perfect period details like the wallet chains swinging from the characters’ hips, High School finds identical twins Sara (Seazynn Gilliland) and Tegan (Railey Gilliland) navigating uncharted territory in more ways than one. 14 (Amazon Freevee)Ĭast: Seazynn Gilliland, Railey Gilliland, Cobie Smulders, Kyle BornheimerĮxecutive producers: Clea DuVall, Tegan Quin, Sara Quin, Laura Kittrell, Jeremy Kleiner, Dede Gardner, Carina Sposato
0 kommentar(er)
