Okay, so the clickbait title is just my personal revenge against the show’s hatred of everything related to the internet. But still, it probably is.

If you haven’t seen it, Selfie is nominally a contemporary reimagining of classic classist musical My Fair Lady. Only this time, instead of a man fixing a woman’s unfortunate case of the cockneys, it’s a man fixing a woman’s unfortunate case of the social medias.

This premise has not aged well in the least. At one point in the pilot, Eliza (Karen Gillan with an American accent and numerous dated references to the internet) walks into Henry’s (John Cho) office and tells him:

“I’m Eliza, I work in sales, and it recently came to my attention that I need a man to fix me.”

Only with more words and less clarity. For the first half of the pilot, this is a show that delights in demeaning its protagonist, while using her as a proxy for an entire class of people. The instigating incident of the entire plot is that Eliza finds out her new boyfriend happens to be married, and then vomits on a plane. And when her sick bag bursts all over her, this is supposed to be a deserved comeuppance for her, a moment we’re to laugh at and she is to learn from.

Rather than, you know, a woman being devastated because a man misled her. The reveal is shown by the tan line on his ring finger — ie, this bloke has taken off his wedding ring so as to not advertise that he’s married; and yet, the tone suggests that this is all her fault, and that she needs to come to some personal reexamination. The undercurrent of slutshaming in this scene is staggering.

The key difference between this show and the original My Fair Lady is this: Eliza is supposed to be a bad person. Her crimes involve having too much and/or the wrong kind of sex; and participating in social media. This has left her completely friendless because:

Being friended is not the same as having friends.

This is a verbatim quote. That’s the trenchant criticism of today’s kids and their social media-obsessed culture we’re getting. If screens had ejector seats I would have decoupled mine at that point.

For a good two-minute stretch, Karen Gillan speaks entirely in vaguely millenialesque lingo, throwing out references that are so jumbled in their time frame and point of origin that it’s unclear what kind of internet denizen Eliza is supposed to be, exactly. Is she a tween that never grew up? Is she a parody of people with insufferably dull Instagrams? Is she on 4chan?

I was praying the whole company had forgotten about my epic fail. Or at least that I could make like Elsa and let it go.

I have to point out those two references are seven years apart and come from totally different places in the culture. This is not critique from within. This is a crotchety eye turned towards a (not so young) youth culture that the writers only seem to view in glimpses. The jokes here are going to seem trite to anyone who has ever been on the internet. At one point someone remarks that Eliza Instagrams her food, which I guess is topical by the standards of network television.

For the second half of the pilot, of course, everything starts to turn around for Eliza, because a man has come into her life to tell her how to think and act. We are then properly introduced to the other two female characters in Selfie: Eliza’s neighbour Bryn (Allyn Rachel) and the receptionist at her office, Charmonique (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Bryn puts the lie to the idea that this is a show with contempt for a character and not for a whole class of people. She is presented as the antithesis to Eliza, but is herself another tired millennial stereotype, the hipster. Similarly obsessed with trends and social media, Bryn is herself a vehicle for trite jokes. At one point, one of her feminist book club friends (Names: Thistle, Wren, Prue and Eyelet) pulls out an ukulele as part of an impromptu Lady Gaga chorus performance.

Charmonique, for her part, is a competent and empathetic black woman, and at this point, I no longer trust this show to do something with that other than what you probably already expect. Towards the end of the pilot she is there to deliver an epiphany and a high-five to Eliza.

Here’s the thing though: Selfie is a competently written show performed by some very game actors. It’s not unmitigated garbage, and that makes it so much harder to slam the show, because clearly the people behind it do believe in it and want it to be good. Gillan and Cho have real chemistry with one another, and the dialog is full of charming grace notes — when it’s not sinking into poorly made references, at least. And yet.

And yet.

It’s just so mean-spirited, and so out of touch, and so hateful in its attitudes. The target audience for Selfie seems to be made up of MRAs who long for an imagined past when people were “classy.” The mean-spiritedness of the script is not so much a product of a generational gap as a sort of fundamental crotchetyness.

The pilot for Selfie appears as a tragic misstep because it’s unwilling to evaluate the ugliness of its premise, or to offer empathy to its protagonist — until said protagonist listens to and obeys to a man’s advice, thus becoming empathy-worthy. It is downright uncomfortable to watch.

Maybe the rest of this season is about Selfie clawing its way out of its own premise to become a watchable show. But if so, it’ll do that with that albatross of a pilot hanging ‘round its neck.