Sometimes, out of the wilds of the hunt for IP, the right creative team can scavenge something nearly original. Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, High Fidelity, about a record-store owner whose collector’s impulse extends beyond his albums to an ever-growing inventory of personal heartbreaks, already received the cinematic treatment in 2000, with John Cusack in the role of Rob Fleming, the story’s central forlorn romantic. Reintroducing Hornby’s vinylphile on this side of the digital and streaming divide is such an unlikely and surprising choice that it actually works.
The film updated the book’s location from London to Chicago. Now, the Hulu show has updated that location once again, to Brooklyn. Rob is no longer short for Robert, but for Robyn, and this Rob is played by Zoë Kravitz. For those who only know Kravitz from her one-dimensionally aloof character on the first season of Big Little Lies or from her one-dimensionally distraught character on the second season of Big Little Lies, the many shades of Zoë are a joy to discover. In trendy Fleabag fashion, Rob spends a generous amount of time on the near side of the fourth wall, clueing the viewers in to her emotional landscape. Like her High Fidelity forebears, her preferred method of emoting is the top five list, and counting down her top five breakups provides the embryonic structure for the series, just as it did for the book and the film before it.
Some vestiges from the original age better than others, though. Even in 2020, Rob is still adamant about the dos and do-nots of curating the perfect playlist, and she spends an entire episode early in the season espousing her philosophy. As a former mixtape, then mix-CD, aficionado myself, this seems a labor of love best left to the twenty-aughts. With a universally accessible music library through Spotify and the lack of the 80-minute time limit, the modern playlist is a paradigm without contours, endless and depersonalized, now more the province of paid tastemakers than fervent connoisseurs. Is Rob really that out of step with the times, or is she just the victim of reboot anxiety, blurred between a callback and a fresh look?