Awkward

A series about a high-school girl that's neither maudlin nor alarming nor conceived with intent to preach or to shock. It's further distinguished by its focus on entirely recognizable teenage pains, as endured by an entirely recognizable teenager, Jenna. Its other distinction: strong echoes of an older kind of storytelling, the sort whose characters grow and acquire depth.

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.

If the dramas are exaggerated, Jenna makes the trauma feel legitimate, and her narration gives everything a knowing undertone of humor and self-awareness that keeps the most uncomfortable moments from being painful.

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.

Not only are high school horrors pretty universal, even if the specifics change, but I can find a way to fit "Awkward" into a tradition of hyper-literal high school comedies like "Pretty in Pink" or "Heathers" or "Mean Girls" or "Juno" or "The In-Betweeners" (if your taste runs to British TV). It's not as good as any of those, but it's not as bad as "Jawbreaker," which is in the same tradition.

The life of an everyday American high school girl has rarely been rendered with such sly and funny precision as it is in MTV's aptly named Awkward.

Aside from the gratuitous sexual stuff, Awkward is a really good, funny, fun show.

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.

The humor isn't exactly subtle, but much of it rings true.

Thanks to clever dialogue, Awkward manages to rise above its been-there, watched-that premise.

Awkward is adept in some quick cutaways, as in a classroom scene that echoes "Ferris Bueller." Rickards works so hard to emulate "Easy A" star Emma Stone, she just might end up in a full body cast by the end of the season. But with the tide going out on such reality drivel as "Jersey Shore," Awkward is a cagey move for MTV.