She navigates the sharky waters of high school, friends, mean cheerleaders, and cute boys with a snarky voice-over that makes her--and Awkward.--easy to fall in love with.
Gosh, that's a lot of derivative teen-movie influences for a half-hour show. Yet the swift pacing and simplicity of Awkward remind us that awkwardness can still be freshly painful and funny material, so long as there are still teenagers and high schools.
Awkward is a wry show about longing--for love, certainly, but also for consistency, that great intangible in the ever-morphing world of high school life.
Jenna being actually pretty adorable. And so is Awkward, which, like "Glee," deals gently and semicomically with issues of sexuality and bullying but never really draws blood.
While the premise is refreshingly gimmick-free compared with "RJ Berger" or "Teen Wolf," the situations aren't compelling enough to make this much more than a latter-day "Doogie Howser, M.D." with a gender switch.