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HBO's Ja'mie: Private School Girl: gimme an F

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Chris Lilley stars in Ja’mie: Private School Girl. HBO photo

Premiering: Sunday, Nov. 24th at 9:30 p.m. (central) on HBO
Starring: Chris Lilley, Georgie Jennings, Georgia Treu, Laura Grady, Phoebe Roberts, D’Arci Buckerfield, Tayla Duyal
Produced by: Chris Lilley, Laura Waters

By ED BARK
@unclebarkycom on Twitter
This won’t take terribly long. HBO sent all six Season One episodes of Ja’mie: Private School Girl. Two were all I could take.

It’s not that “Australian sensation” Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High, Angry Boys) doesn’t know how to portray a thoroughly self-absorbed, lesbian-baiting, fat-loathing high school mean girl clique leader named Ja’mie King. It’s just that he quickly becomes a big drag (in drag) in this one-note, off-putting comedy series being paired on Sunday nights with HBO’s immensely superior Getting On.

Lilley’s character, striving to become “Best Girl in Year 12” at privileged Hillford Girls Grammar, is less inviting than colon cancer. Perhaps Lilley is endeavoring to make a “statement” of some sort. But lines such as “Shut your fat face” (to a female classmate) and “Shutup, who asked you?” (to his mother) are piled high to the point of gratuitously piling on. What can we learn from this? Nothing at all -- charitably speaking.

Ja’mie’s posse is a gaggle of six giggling sycophants whose collective IQ perhaps approaches room temperature in an igloo. Their all-that activities become redundant and tiresome at WARP speed, raising the overall question of whether watching Ja’mie: Private School Girl on a continuous loop would be worse than eternal burning in hell.

So no, I’m not a fan.

GRADE: F

Email comments or questions to: unclebarky@verizon.net