Okay, a brief confession: when I first watched season one of The Afterparty last year, I wasn’t totally sold on it. I think there were a couple reasons for that: I wasn’t paying super close attention while I watched it (yes I was doing the whole second screen thing), which meant the whole “everyone’s story is its own movie genre” bit was initially lost on me; there was also the fact that it was doled out one episode per week, which made it harder to remember who had said what and how the various characters’ perspectives differed from one another as they each recounted the same eventful evening.
But I liked it well enough to check out season 2 when it dropped a few weeks ago, and as that one grew on me, I decided to give season 1 another shot, this time with my mom. On rewatch, I liked the show a lot better (my mom was also a fan). But I also realized that the chill bi rep that had charmed me in season 2 had been there from the beginning — and that season 1’s version might have been even more nuanced.
I’m going to be a little more spoilery here because I’m talking about a season of a show that aired a whole year ago, so steer clear if you absolutely cannot bear to be exposed to even mild spoilers for The Afterpary S1 (and if you can’t, I mean… get on watching it ASAP).
Okay, those weirdos are gone, so we can continue.
The first season of The Afterparty takes place in the wake of a high school reunion, one where everyone seems to have a grudge and scores are destined to be settled. In the midst of all of this is Chelsea (Ilana Glazer), the one time popular girl turned trainwreck whose life was derailed by a particularly eventful St. Patrick’s Day party during senior year of high school — one that Chelsea never recovered from.
Chelsea’s bisexuality is pretty casually revealed; we see her have onscreen relationships with some of the men from her high school, and at one point she briefly mentions being devastated by a breakup with a lady ex. Also, she’s played by Ilana Glazer, so that’s a big tell. But it’s not just the reveal of her sexual orientation that I think makes her arc such good bi rep: it’s also the story of how she fell from grace, of what exactly happened during that St. Patrick’s Day party.
[Additional spoiler warning so no one yells at me.]
The way it all breaks down is like so: in the spring of senior year, Chelsea breaks up with her equally popular boyfriend Ned, figuring that they’re on their way to different schools in different cities, and don’t really have much in common to begin with. That decision puts her on thin ice, particularly with her mean girl clique, who seem to be more invested in Ned than their ostensible friend. At the party, Chelsea decides to make a break with her past by getting utterly plastered — and while she’s drunk, she winds up chatting with a nerdy classmate, who ends up leading her into a bedroom, where they lie on the bed and chat.
You see where this is going, right? Everyone sees Chelsea drunkenly entering a bedroom with a boy who’s not her recent ex, and they all assume it can only mean one thing. Complicating matters further (and there’s an in world explanation for this that makes sense but that I don’t feel like going into here) is the fact that another boy is hiding in this bedroom’s bathroom — and when the nerdy kid and this other guy wind up exiting the room in short order, everyone decides that Chelsea has just had a threesome with two randos. That, it turns out, is what precipitated Chelsea’s social downfall. And if you ask me, it’s a particularly bi story.
I mean, true, Chelsea isn’t found in bed with partners of two different genders, but the threesome itself is kind of permanently fused to bisexuals, regardless of the genders of the participants. As a bi woman, Chelsea’s more likely to be read as a slut; as a bi woman who just dumped her nice, popular boyfriend; she’s likely to be seen as someone on the verge of a trampage. You know the common assumption: if a person’s willing to have sex with more than one gender, what won’t they do, right? Though it’s never explicitly put in these terms, it makes sense to me to think of Chelsea’s bisexuality as fuel for her downfall: it primed her classmates to turn on her. It primed her classmates to believe the worst about her. Sure, her gender is a component here as well — but I think her bisexuality is a crucial factor in why her peers were so willing to believe she’d hop into bed with two near strangers at a high school party right after dumping her boyfriend (I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that).
What’s nice about The Afterparty’s take on all this is that it is unquestioningly on Chelsea’s side. Not just because it ultimately reveals that Chelsea did nothing wrong, but because even before we know what happened — even when Chelsea is nothing more to us than a drunken, paranoid trainwreck on the outs with everyone from high school — the show has sympathy of her. We’re invited to see her as a full human, to live inside her head, to understand what it feels like to be the girl who’s been ostracized and never managed to recover from it. We’re invited to empathize with her, even at her lowest moments, even as she makes terrible mistakes, even as she fulfills some of the worst predictions people have of her.
I would like more of this, please.