There are good reasons why many American teens stress about prom: it’s expensive, heightened, fraught with status and identity; the photos will haunt you forever; it’s a coming-of-age milestone freighted with significance, thanks in part to countless films and TV shows in which teens stress about prom. To that canon there is now a new throwaway entry: Hulu’s Prom Dates, a cringeworthy comedy produced by Kevin Hart, which posits that in the year 2024, two seemingly self-possessed girls sincerely believe that having a prom date – any prom date, but especially a cool one – is the single most important thing in the world. That it’s the one reason to stay in a cartoonishly terrible relationship, or go on a fishing expedition in search of passable strangers to drag back for one night in high school.
This is just one of the many grating elements in Prom Dates, directed by Kim O Nguyen from a script by DJ Mausner. Others include, in no particular order: overuse of jokes, however well-meaning and couched in a razor-thin plot of acceptance, predicated on stereotypes of lesbians in lieu of cleverness; extremely off-putting, self-obsessed characters; overweening performances; gratuitous projectiles of vomit and/or blood as desperate bids for laughs; an overly hammy character named Greg (Kenny Ridwan) that queasily milks the stereotype of the emasculated, nerdy Asian male. (All of these issues recall the woefully ill-conceived HBO series Generation, a one-star review that haunts me, which is maybe part of the problem.)
