Written by Melissa Henson | Published February 13, 2020
This For-Adults-Only Comedy Central Show Also Airs on Kid-Centric Nickelodeon
To listen to Comedy Central’s hype about its newest original series, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, you would think it was America’s greatest contribution to humor since Mark Twain: “Best new comedy of the brand-new decade!” “It’s Awkwafina’s world and we’re all just living in it!” “The next hit for Comedy Central!” “A hysterical high!”
High praise indeed for a series that amounts to little more than tired jokes about millennials who can’t “adult.”
Awkwafina centers on Nora Lin, a woman in her late-twenties who spends her ample free-time smoking pot, playing video games, and masturbating. She’s an unemployed underachiever who still lives with her father and grandmother in Queens.
The first episode tracks Nora’s failure to launch: She decides to move out of her family home and in with her high school friend Chenise, who is now a high-powered attorney, but she soon discovers that her roommate isn’t really an attorney at all. Instead, she performs online for “420 Camchicks.com” as “Ganja Gayal 420.” Unemployed after getting fired from her job as a driver for “Commutz,” she agrees to do a video with Chenise, but accidentally sets Chenise’s apartment on fire. Rather than return home, humiliated at her failure to make it on her own, she sleeps in her car – until her car gets towed.
Episode two follows Nora as she accompanies her grandmother to Atlantic City for the day and gets run out of the casino after getting caught counting cards. The third episode tracks Nora’s attempts to hold down a job while also staying up all night playing video games by downing Adderall, coffee and energy drinks to stay awake. When she runs out of Adderall, she pressures her teenaged neighbor to give her his prescription ADD medication.
Shockingly, Awkwafina is rated as appropriate for viewers as young as 14 – but the content suggests that a TV-MA (Mature Audiences) rating fits better.
In the opening seconds of episode 2, Awkwafina is depicted smoking pot from a bong, pulling a sex toy (a large pink phallus-shaped vibrator) out from under her bed, and texting her friend “I will be masturbating for the next 7 to 12 hours.”
In just three episodes, Awkwafina featured pixilated nudity, prescription drug abuse (including one scene where Nora crushes prescription Adderall, cuts it into lines and snorts it through a straw), thirteen “bleeped” uses of “f*ck” and 8 unbleeped uses of “sh*t.”
Parents should know that although Awkwafina was developed for Comedy Central; it re-airs throughout the week on other Viacom-owned properties, including Nickelodeon, making the possibility that kids will have access much more likely.
Weep for the state of comedy if this is the best this decade has to offer.