Poor, impressionable youth. 
   A lifetime of watching TV has convinced Nicole that college is a magical chance to start over, to live a thrilling new existence, to shed the socially awkward image she’s always had. But here she is, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, alone in her dorm room on a Saturday night.
   “I wanna be Felicity,” she complains.
   “Freshman Diaries,” the remarkable new reality series premiering Aug. 31 at 11 p.m. on Showtime, shuns any generalizations about college life (aside from the fact that everyone consumes enormous quantities of alcohol).
   Instead, it captures the swirl of excitement, panic, exhilaration, insecurity, joy and terror that teenagers feel in their first months on their own.
   The show, created by R.J. Cutler (who did something similar with high schoolers in the PBS series “American High”), follows 12 first-year students from their arrival at the Austin campus to their final exams. Cameras trail them around at all times, and they’ve been given their own cameras to record video diaries.
    The premiere is utterly enthralling.
   We meet Casey, who dreams of going into theater but has decided to major in computer science instead, “because that’s what my father suggested I should do.” After all, she says, “I live for my parents’ acceptance.”
   Before long, she’s drinking herself silly, kissing a girl, and announcing, “I’ve been a good girl all my life and I’m sick of it and I don’t want to do that anymore.”
   We meet Neil, who holds up his yearbook and declares that “all these people in this high school—they were fucking assholes to me because I’m gay.” He soon discovers he’s uncomfortable around groups of gay people — “I don’t know how to be gay,” he explains — and develops a crush on a female classmate that leaves him completely mystified.
   And we meet Kyle, a cocky, popular guy who adored high school. (His social life, from what we see, mostly involved drinking and vomiting with pals in a parking lot.) His two best friends, both Indian, are starting at the University of Texas too, but once they arrive, they begin hanging out with members of their own ethnic group and drifting away from him.
   The show has wisely chosen to focus on only a few characters in each episode, which prevents the usual reality show practice of buffeting the viewer with too many indistinguishable new faces.
  Despite the natural tendency to act for the cameras, the incredible vulnerability of 18-year-olds in their first days at college ensures that we see a fair amount of unguarded, raw emotion. Kyle’s discomfort at being the only white face at a party, Neil’s bewilderment at his possible attraction to a woman, and Casey’s tears when she fails a test all seem completely genuine.
   The second episode isn’t quite as successful, mostly because of the introduction of Luis, an insufferable drama queen who refers to himself as a “Mexican fag” and draws every breath as though he’s trying out for “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
  But when he’s offscreen, “Freshman Diaries” rings true. College means vastly different things to the 12 students, but all are forced to struggle and search for new identities. 
   Even Nicole, the Felicity-wannabe, finally realizes that a new life won’t simply come to her by itself. In high school, she never went on a date, never kissed a boy, never drank, and never even drove over the speed limit. By the end of episode two, she’s doing shots, making out with a stranger, and forming a new philosophy: “Fuck it—that’s my motto.”
   Whether she’s just loosening up or about to veer dangerously out of control remains to be seen. Anything’s possible, after all — it’s college.

August 27,2003© 2003 Media Life

-Dan Jewel is a senior writer at Star magazine in New York and a frequent contributor to Media Life.

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