Early September is the ideal time to delve into a new TV show. It’s that weird lull between the end of summer internships and the return to Evanston when all your friends already have left for college. During the lull, I was flipping through Hulu.com and, at a friend’s suggestion, checked out an episode of “Dorm Life,” the ‘mockumentary’ web series created by former UCLA students that chronicles the ups and downs of the first year of dorm living. The tagline of the show is “This isn’t Real Life. This is Dorm Life.”
It was almost absurdly easy to get addicted to Dorm Life. I admit that I watched both seasons of about 20 five-to-ten minute episodes in a span of 48 hours. Here’s why.
The show’s premise is simple: take the freshman year of college, add the requisite archetypes – the straitlaced mama’s boy, the artsy space cadet, the übercompetitive RA – and throw in webcams and a filming style reminiscent of “The Office.” The result is a funny, bizarre, visceral and at times surprisingly poignant chronicle of freshman year. As a result of its webisode format, the series moves at a clip – the jokes are quick and witty and the plot thickens and becomes interesting pretty fast. It’s simple to get into “Dorm Life” without committing your entire life to a new TV series (although you’ll want to).
You get cozy with this band of residents from 5-South because they’re just like your freshman year floor, just a little more extreme and absurd than you remember. Everyone’s antics aside, you find yourself wanting perfect hipster girl Brittany Wilcox and everyman protagonist Mike Sanders to just hook up and get it over with already. You root for the anal retentive Danny B to work things out with mystery hot girl. You kind of want the hard-partying Shane Reilly to become floor president, even if it will break Steph Schwartzman’s school spirit-filled little heart. The series is marked by the major milestones of freshman year – studying for your midterm in a throwaway distro like ‘Earthquakes,’ taking a road trip during spring break and prepping for the year-end ‘dormal.’
What’s even better is how hardcore the cast is. They lived in character in a dorm at a Buddhist-founded university outside L.A., hanging out, living life and posting webcam videos to the site during their time there. For fans of “The Office,” even the characters’ knowing glances are familiar; the dorm lifers seem hyper-aware of the camera crew that has seemingly unfettered access to their lives. It’s an addictive combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, a jumble of stuff you remember and things you probably tried to forget from your freshman experience. “Dorm Life,” in all its glory, might be a good guide for freshmen about what to do (or not do) their first year and how to learn to love the hodgepodge crew of kids who live around them.
The series’ second season ended in July, but in a recent interview, cast members say they’re interested in keeping the show going for a third season. Here’s to their sophomore year.
