Chewing Gum

Grandma,

This semester I’ve been in a writing class titled Netflix and Quill. It’s a required course and we do a lot of assignments that improve our writing skills, so it isn’t a useless class. Every weekend, we’ve had to watch a new show or movie on Netflix and write blog posts (they’re essentially our thoughts on the show or an evaluation of it, and we connect various things that we learn in class to the show. Another thing that we do while doing the weekly assignment is tailoring that review to a specific audience, which changes each week. For example, once, we had to write our posts to be specific to another class at Truman. Another time, we had to write our posts for other people in our class. This weekend, we had to write a post to a family member, and I chose to write to you.

The show that I watched for this weekend is called Chewing Gum. I watched the first two episodes of it and found it really entertaining and relatable. The show revolves around a girl named Tracey, who I’m pretty sure is supposed to be around my age if not a little bit older. She learns something new about the world and herself in every episode (at least that’s what I’m assuming from seeing the first two). The way that her interactions with other people are portrayed as being extremely awkward and realistic, yet comical. This is how I imagine most of my interactions with the world around me appear as well.

I find myself identifying with Tracey’s character a lot mainly because of her strange interactions with others. The main idea of the show is that Tracey is learning how to do things like purchasing Plan B from a drug store. The show covers things that she should theoretically already know. I find myself in this situation all the time in my day-to-day life, where I’m faced with a task or obstacle that I should know how to take care of, but I’ve never had to. Like a few weeks ago, my car’s tire pressure got low and an emergency light came on in my car. I kind of panicked and had to google how to put air in my tires. Another example of me not knowing this is how I’m not always sure how to use certain punctuations correctly or properly title my papers. Even though these are all things that you have to learn at some point, and it’s completely normal to not know how to do them, you feel ridiculous for not knowing. That’s why Chewing Gum is such an important show. It’s a show that other people like me can watch and relate to, and find humour in our own shortcomings and experiences through it.

The show takes place in London, which is interesting because the characters have British accents and refer to objects with different words than we usually would. Other than that, the concepts that are addressed are universal, and could apply to the life of any young adult anywhere. This element of relatability that the show has is invaluable, because shows that are more realistic and representative of the average person’s life are generally very enjoyable to watch. It’s a very interesting show, and I would definitely watch it again for recreational purposes.

Anyway, thank you for reading this.