Camp: Series Premiere

With the exception of Camp Crystal Lake (those bloodstains are never coming out of the wood paneling), people love camp. Fictional camp life has been one of pop culture’s more resilient symbols of ruggedness, a place were man and beast can live at least three feet apart and going without Wi-Fi for a weekend is treated like an act of contrition. No one needs to go to camp—it’s about as necessary to life as an oxygen bar. (At least in the forest oxygen is free and doesn’t smell like piña colada.) There’s something pioneering and wholesome about it, like we’re somehow making Ma and Pa Ingalls proud.

For a sunny NBC summer show intended to fill time before Fall television returns, Camp couldn’t be a more apropos topic. Just the mention of camp produces wistful longing. Lakes and talent shows and young love burritoed up with mosquitoes and Lyme disease and unwashed hair. Even though I attended a far less bacchanalian church camp growing up, it was still the type of place where chaste memories were made. With its bright, crisp aesthetic, Camp taps into this longing—for about five minutes. Once its characters are introduced, all you want is to go back into the air-conditioning.

Set in a non-specific American locale, Camp centers on the Little Otter Family Camp, an all-ages boondocks delight. Wrangling its seasonal woodland dwellers is Mackenzie Granger (Rachel Griffiths), the owner and on-site manager. On the verge of losing Little Otter after a recent separation from a philandering husband, Mack is fending off offers to buy her land—as well as fielding some heavy romantic hate-sex vibes—to a rival camp owner interested in the property.  Like every year, she’s joined by her son Buzz (Charles Grounds), a virgin teenager looking to round all of the tantric bases this summer, and a hoard of young counselors who look like they walked out of a BOD Man fragrance ad. 

The newcomer to Little Otter is Kip (Thom Green), an introverted youth forced there by his well-meaning family, and Marina (Lily Sullivan), a brunette female of average height and build who, as of this episode, has nothing much to do but wear a bikini and become a love interest for Kip. She is also the lucky recipient of the episode’s only superfluous flashback. (Another jump involves Mack’s ex-husband and his much younger Russian love interest, but that’s more of a flashaway). In this short scene it’s revealed that back home Marina is considered a horrible, no-good “slut” for flashing her boobs and getting them plastered across the Internet.

As for Kip, only in television land is a conventionally attractive guy labeled a "freak" and harassed by a Ken doll in a grocery store for no discernable reason other than he's wearing long sleeves under a t-shirt. (Maybe it was the skinny jeans?) Even his “bad boy” nose ring is gone, ripped out earlier after a fishing pole accident. (Granted, Kip isn’t a terribly likable character to begin with. At one point he confesses to hating stars—the celestial kind—for no reason other than he thinks it makes him seem complex. Well, emo kid, the stars think you’re a tool.)

The rest of the kids are all shades of self-serving, predicable, and horrible. (Dena Kaplan’s Sarah seems the sweetest of the counselors, but that could be screwed up by next week so I’m not holding my breath.) Late in the episode, in retaliation for some earlier aggression, the chiseled, Abercrombie models of Little Otter embark on a mission to steal sound equipment from the rich, elitist Dolce & Gabbana gang from Camp Ridgefield across the lake. Honestly, just about every time any of them walk the dock it's like a backwoods Fashion Week.      

Sex, drugs, and synchronized group dancing is about as exciting as it gets in this first Otter outing. The tone of Camp certainly doesn’t match the alternate definition of its kitschy name. A proclaimed dramedy with very little “dram”—except for when it pulls the left-field “I had Leukemia!” card for Kip—and not enough “edy” to sustain the mood. (Hello mudduh, hello fadduh; here I am at Camp Grin-nada.)

The overuse of the word “slut” (twice used to derogatorily describe Marina) and an uncalled-for subplot of Buzz using the word “faggy” (cribbing from Glee; which at least genuinely criticized the use of the slur) both act as stale marshmallows in an otherwise passable s’more. Even the teenage daughter of the multi-racial gay family staying at the camp, though initially offended, eventually forgives Buzz because she’s a love interest. Her only jab toward him: “Oh look, it’s Reverend Fred Phelps from Westboro Baptist.” (Nothing is lost in translation. It sounds just as awkward as it reads.

With Griffiths alone there’s enough talent in the "adult" cast to keep watching Camp. The key: more Mack, less of her spawn. Like The OC before it, the grownups are by far the more interesting of the bunch, even though it’s the nubile young’uns that are meant to be front and center. To make it to next season, the show needs to overhaul the main players and dump the customary cliques. Nostalgia is powerful, but it also helps us forget the rainy days and bug bites and pinecone-induced sprained ankles. If Camp doesn’t get its act together, we might just end up leaving long before this campfire story is done.