High Fidelity

While it’s hard to imagine rooting for Cusack’s dour, womanizing Rob 20 years later, this revision works. ... What’s even more satisfying is how a change in casting shifts the meaning of Hornby and Frears’ stories. ... In a blow against essentialism, these characters are multifaceted human beings before they’re representatives of their gender, race or sexual orientation.

"Fidelity" works as a new take on a well-known story while standing on its own. Elements from the book and film are playfully reimagined here. ... The writing is sharp and concise, and at 10 half-hour episodes, it feels exactly the right length.

Viewers expecting a tight, compact album might be pleasantly surprised to see this season take on a more open-ended Spotify playlist feel, designed to keep playing and be enjoyed knowing that the end is still far in the future. At times, it’s an eclectic mix of ideas and execution, but there’s a great amount of satisfaction in just letting it all wash over you.

By the time Episode 5 rolls around, with the great Parker Posey guest-starring as a kooky artist looking to unload her cheating husband’s mega valuable record collection, High Fidelity has established a funky, unassuming charm all its own. It’s kind of like your favorite local dive bar: nothing too flashy, but a reliable combination of fun people, a killer jukebox and good vibes.

The series sets up myriad intriguing possibilities and wows with enough stellar soundtrack songs and pop culture-laden dialogue to keep us on the hook for more. By the final episodes, the previous High Fidelity seems less like a copied original and more like an inspired springboard to enable a more engaging character to improve her life and herself.

Yes, she’s insufferable, and yes there are times I had to press pause from second-hand embarrassment to yell at the screen, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING ROB?”, but as a woman of color who once cried over the mere thought of someone taking her Led Zeppelin records post-breakup, it was nice to feel seen for once. Besides, even in her problematic self-indulgence, there’s something in Kravitz’s portrayal of Rob that makes you feel for her.

With Kravitz stepping into the role of Rob, now a queer black woman who owns a record store in Brooklyn, High Fidelity becomes a much more sincere project. By the very nature of the generational shift to millennials – and the change in leads – Hulu's adaptation has nary an ironic bone in sight.

Charming. ... Hulu’s High Fidelity does, refreshingly, correct the exclusionary spirit that went with the original’s lack of diversity. Yet crucially, the series retains the assurance that music preferences reflect something individual, ineffable, soul-deep, and in need of sharing.

“High Fidelity”—both then and now—is about the timeless, vicarious narrative charms of any secret society/gang/club/superhero team. The insiders are outsiders and eccentrics who possess superpowers. In “High Fidelity,” the superpowers are in their ears. Their consequent oddities and obsessions only make them more endearing. Ms. Kravitz is particularly so, most of the time. ... If nothing else, the show drops its needle on a certain millennial hipster groove, without losing touch with its Gen X ancestor.

It’s a slow-growing pleasure that does justice to them bones. ... After the rocky first half of the season, Kravitz becomes a fine lead, with a winning mixture of hipness, sadness, and loyalty. She is a woman who can be a creep — but because she knows it, she radiates the possibility that she can change. Chill, quietly charismatic, she ultimately makes for a great hang.

In addition to Kravitz’s performance, the most enjoyable elements of “High Fidelity” are the music (good luck getting “Come on Eileen” out of your mind after the first episode), the glamorized sense of place (Brooklyn comes off as a gentrification postcard), and the R-rated but totally entertaining back-and-forth between Rob and her record-store employees, Simon (David H. Holmes) and Cherise (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).

In keeping with High Fidelity’s musical sensibilities, it seems correct to describe the show not as a remake but as an interesting, fun cover of the classic original.

The series is a love letter to its source material, to the music that plays throughout, to New York City (with a gentrification undercurrent within the season), and even to the rom-com genre.

High Fidelity uses its brilliant cast, sharp writing, and hypnotically cool set design to examine how relationships have and haven’t changed in the modern era.

Rob is arguably the quintessential John Cusack role, but Kravitz winningly steps into those shoes. ... Even if this TV mixtape of High Fidelity misses some fundamental ideas behind the source material, it's still a delight. [Feb 2020, p.86]

Just when it seems like Rob might be a little too cool for school, she wins us over with her childlike eating habits (she’s forever spooning “meals” from a bowl) and her openness about how silly and stupid and irrational she has sometimes behaved in the name of love.

Hulu's "High Fidelity" is probably going to annoy viewers who resent the notion of shoving a woman into a character written to be man on principle. Removing that from the equation, it does spur some insightful ruminations around how much emotional weight we place on music and any adopted cynical stances one might around what is cool and allowed and what is verboten. Some of it plays out with the episodes but I was most aware of it within my internal dialogue.

High Fidelity has many charms. But it does also have a recurring dissonance, a bunch of vestigial generational and dude behaviors that make the record skip.

The scenes that serve this theme [come to terms with the serial failures of her romantic life] are fine, and often funny. ... The romantic narrative is less interesting than Rob’s scenes with Simon and Cherise, or their scenes without her. Randolph is the show’s stealth star, as Jack Black, in the analogous part, was in the film. ... But it’s all well-played, good-looking, enjoyable modern light entertainment, with a side of social satire. I’m inclined to recommend it.

I get that the main character is afraid to commit, but her show seems afraid to commit, too. At 10 episodes, it still feels superficial — beautiful, certainly, with an aesthetic that’s glowy but never sweaty, but vague.

The result is a show which is sometimes grating yet sneakily beguiling, in the way that beautiful, curated messiness can be.

The story needs more help than Kravitz can give it, leaning on a fairly simple and uninteresting sort-of-love-triangle (she misses her ex, who is now engaged to someone else) that would not exist without coincidence and fairly unbelievable behavior on the part of all parties. ... Sometimes, though, this (despite it all!) very watchable show snaps into being something more.

The creators of this "High Fidelity" TV series fail to expand on the material to the point where 10 episodes can be sustained.

High Fidelity may have a rollicking soundtrack, both on-screen and in its pace, but its depth is fairly shallow.

The cynical prickliness of the material — along with Rob’s incessant fourth-wall narration, describing her woe-is-me mismanagement of her own feelings — is too easily recognizable as a forgery.

“High Fidelity” has always concerned itself with nostalgia for youthful heartbreak, but, this time around, the mists of memory haze obscure the hero. The show unfolds in some atemporal nostalgia zone; Rob seems like a middle-aged person’s idealized view of a heartbroken young person. The song remains the same, but the playback device is somehow obsolete.