Ja’mie King, the private school exchange student, may have been the most obnoxious of the three characters Chris Lilley played on “Summer Heights High.”
But at least there were three on that show. When one of them got to be too much, relief came when the story shifted to one of the others.
On the follow-up “Ja’mie: Private School Girl,” another Australian series that also ended up on HBO, where it had had its finale Sunday, she’s in about every scene, which can be taxing considering how self-centered, petulant, bullying, racist and homophobic she can be.
But even though he’s more than 20 years older than a teenager at 39, Lilley has really nailed the cadences of a teen, as well as the weird hair-flipping, the coy looks, the odd way of running with hands to the side — just about everything in teenage girls has been studied and replicated, so that she fits right in with the rest of the more age appropriate classmates.
(It’s even more amazing that it all translates from Australia to North America, proving teens may be the same all over the industrialized world).
All through the six-episode series, the main dream of Ja’mie (who dropped the apostrophe in her name to make it seem more interesting than Jamie) is win the school’s top honor,the Hilford Medal.
She’s already blown that, and somebody who is lesser in her estimation, “a dumb, fat lesbian” as she calls her has won and gets to perform the interpretive dance that is also apparently a part of winning.
Ja’mie is angry, but has a plan. When it’s time for her to give a speech, she declares she was robbed because her school is racist and couldn’t abide by the fact that she sexted the Ugandan exchange student that lived at her house.
To prove how free she is, she does a dance in which she strips down. It’s the special effect triumph of the series as Lilley, a man who plays a teen, is also seen as having bare breasts of a girl.
She is subsequently kicked out of school. She considers going to do aid work in Africa for her gap year, but finds something “more important than friends, school and Africans” — the quest to “find someone of equal looks, class and color.”
Time jumps and she’s at Blaxland College where she has forgotten about the boyfriend she briefly had, Mitchell, and is experimenting with girls. She’s still as bossy and petulant as before, but maybe a little mellowed.
And as funny as the series turned out to be, I can’t say we’ll be sad she apparently won’t be coming back (at least not as a teen).
Still, even as he turns 40, Lilley has said he’ll be reviving an even more rebellious “Summer Heights High” character for his next series in 2014, “Jonah from Tonga.”