BELLA SWAY – Moonhaven – Emma MacDonald
Emma MacDonald as Bella Sway
Bella is a pilot shuttling cargo and people between Earth (where human civilization is in its death throes) and the Moon, specifically a 1300 square kilometer colony called Moonhaven, a multi-generational think tank tasked with solving Earth’s problems, both social and technical. Bella also smuggles things, and at the start she is a cynic and a skeptic, but after being drawn into a murder investigation, and aided by a half-sister she knew nothing about, she gradually comes to recognize the value of the seemingly loony Moonhavenites. Some things about Bella are never explained, the main one being her apparent fondness for French culture. The first bit of music she plays in the first episode is “Ne me qitte pas“, by Jaques Brel. The book she is reading when we first meet her is Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s “Night Flight“. Since there will be no second season, we may never know about those things, or exactly why, many years ago, her mother moved to Moonhaven, and died there.
TRISTAN GREEN – Skymed – Kheon Clarke
Kheon Clarke as Tristan Green
He begins by helping deliver a baby. Green negative-flirts with pilot Milocz Novak for a while, then in the fourth episode he makes a play for a well-structured firefighter, and Nowak, who is tending bar at the time, gets jealous. Green’s self-esteem issues make him think it’s because he’s not good enough for the smoke jockey, but it turns out Nowak thinks the fire guy’s not good enough for him. What develops from this is the show’s most stable and interesting relationship. In an interview with Pop Culturalist, Clarke explained that the show doesn’t focus on Green’s sexuality. “It’s more like, ‘This is who he is. He’s living his life.’ This is how society should be…Tristan’s very work-oriented. When it’s time to really get in there and save people, he’s very much about his job, almost militaristic in style. But he also knows how to have fun and let loose and is the sunshine and the glue that holds the group together. His last action in season one is to tell Nowak “I love you”.
ALICE BARONE – Bang Bang Baby – Arianna Becheroni
Arianna Becheroni as Alice Barone
Midway through high school, Alice accidentally finds out that her father, thought dead for many years, is alive and well and living some fifty kilometers from her in Milan. Her mother has concealed this from Alice because her father is a mobster, and her mother disapproves of those. Fueled by a sugar addiction and its attached hallucinations, and aided by her best friend Jimbo, she embarks on a surrealistic and sometimes hilarious journey into several Italian subcultures, not the least of which is the Sicilian ‘ndrangheta. Becheroni told Drama Quarterly: “Obviously growing up without your dad has to be dramatic. I can imagine Alice going to bed at night and thinking of him, maybe saying, ‘Good night, I miss you, dad.’ The thing is, she doesn’t even understand why, after discovering that he’s alive, he hasn’t been looking for her…Then all of a sudden, after meeting up with him, she realizes that what matters isn’t so much why he hasn’t been in touch with her all these years, but what she can do now to be close to him.” The story is based on the autobiographical Mafia Princess by Maria Merico, so from where the first ten episodes leave us, there is quite a bit more to tell.
MAC COYLE – Paper Girls – Sofia Rosinsky
Sofia Rosinsky as Mac Coyle
Mac appears on screen several days before we see any of the other paper girls. She is awakened by her brother Dylan who asks her (in late October, 1988) where his Walkman might be. She says she doesn’t know, and her brother is not happy about that. Mac pilfers some cigarettes from her soundly sleeping stepmother Alice. Plugging earphones into her brother’s music player, she heads out, presumably to deliver papers. A few days later, on the morning of November 1st, she runs into two other paper carriers and tells Tanya “I just saw Wally Becker and his dipshit buddies chase some paper girl down Hemlock.” Tanya and a new girl named Erin follow her to the rescue of KJ, which is where the story begins. Time-traveling Mac will discover that, through her premature death, she became a redemptive force for her family, putting Dylan on track to become a doctor, enabling Alice to overcome alcoholism, and possibly making her own demise less inevitable.
JESSIE SEPTEMBER – Recipes For Love and Murder – Kylie Fisher
Kylie Fisher as Jesse September
Before the addition of Tannie Maria to the staff of the Klein Karoo Gazette, Jessie was the only reporter in town. (She wanted to keep it that way, and competed with Maria for the advice column, but lost. “I loved that Jessie is an empowered colored character, well-read and intelligent.” Fisher told Roslyn Sulcas of the New York Times. “To me, the show held a mirror to South Africa — how much we have and haven’t changed. As hard as we try in our individual capacities, we can’t ignore that these problems exist. But what the series shows is that human problems are human problems, regardless of race.” Jessie is the show’s only character whose family we meet and get to know, and she causes the audience great anxiety by putting herself in a life-threatening situation toward the end of the season. (Thankfully, she survives.)
VALERIE LONG – Astrid & Lilly Save the World – Christina Orjalo
Christina Orjalo as Valerie Long
She hoped for the lead in the school play, but her audition was ruined by a monster called the Jzzxxshh and instead she is cast as The Alligator in Michelle‘s (slightly modified) version of “Romeo and Juliet“. We see her prepare for that audition (which never happened) by rehearsing lines from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof“, material she likely chose because Valerie and Maggie Pollitt are really quite similar people. She is determined to be an actor, and as Maggie says: “…nothing’s more determined than a cat on a tin roof.” After hearing Eggs audition with lines from “Jaws“, Val has found her Brick and is completely obsessed. (Eggs does find it necessary to ask her if she’s pretending about their relationship. “No. No,” she responds. “Never when it comes to us.”) The nature of Val’s family is left to our imagination, and of her past we learn only that her worst memory is of farting onstage during a production of Macbeth. In the final episode, Val and Eggs seem, strangely enough, the happiest couple at the prom.
