Faking It (2014)

Credit the winning cast, especially Volk, and executive producer Carter Covington's sweet/snarky tone for a half hour viewers won't have to pretend to love.

There’s something hilarious and twisted about outcasts running a school and turning out to be as much idiots as the typically popular kids. Faking It is the real deal.

Beyond the joke, the show’s premise is encouraging: that being gay is no big deal.... The engine driving this show is female friendship, the kind strong enough to get you through even high school. For Amy and Karma, we want that.

Faking It is an odd, interesting, lightly subversive, and potentially offensive concoction from MTV. It’s a twisted comedy that has charm, but also a premise that could be insulting if not handled intelligently.

While the show's premise seems like it could be difficult to maintain, Faking It holds up in two early episodes sent for review.

For Stevens' character, Karma, kissing her best friend, Amy (Volk), is a way --admittedly not the most direct way--of getting closer to Liam, a cute guy (Gregg Sulkin) with commitment issues. For Amy, though, it's more complicated, and that's where Faking It begins to seem less like a joke, as the shift in a relationship stirs up feelings that move her into the "questioning" column of LGBTQ.

Questionable taste aside, there are major narrative issues at work in Faking It that go beyond sustaining the faux relationship between Amy and Karma. Tonally, it can never decide to satirize the type of über-tolerance on display at Hester High—as 21 Jump Street did—or hold it in high esteem.