Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Clique’ On Pop, Where A Group Of College Interns Are Doing More Than Just Making Copies

In 2017, the BBC commissioned Skins creator Jess Brittian’s series Clique to air on their digital channel, but eventually aired it on the BBC One mothership, which did well enough to get it a second season. Now Pop has the show’s slick first season, about a group of young college women who may or may not be in over their heads in a world of money, sex and drugs. Read on to find out more…

CLIQUE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two college girls dancing around a dorm room, singing along to pop songs while wearing garbage bag dresses.

The Gist: The girls, Holly McStay (Synnøve Karlsen) and Georgia Cunningham (Aisling Franciosi) are enjoying their freshman year at a university in Edinburgh, as we see when they participate in a dorm party where they dunk themselves in a pool full of booze. The two are best friends, with the outgoing and impulsive Georgia befriending Holly when they were kids after an incident caused Holly to lose all her old friends.

At a club where Georgia’s crush Sam (Harris Dickinson) is playing, Georgia gets completely messed up and three elegantly-dressed young women call their driver Mo (Peter Bankole) over to drive them home. It turns out that these women also go to the same university, as Georgia and Holly find out when taking an in-demand econ class whose professor, Jude McDermid (Louise Brealey) encourages women to be in charge of their own lives and careers. Along with her brother, Alistair (Emun Elliott), Jude runs a corporation called Solasta Finance, who manage funds for bigwig investors. She introduces two accomplished “interns” for Solastra that she says “are scarier than they look.”

Georgia takes the initiative and reintroduces herself to the group, despite the fact that one of them, Fay Appleton (Emma Appleton) gets into a car sobbing. She ingratiates herself to the point where she gets invited to a party that night. After Holly finds out from the dorm’s RA Elizabeth Smith (Sorcha Groundsell) that Georgia left wearing a party dress, she goes to the party herself, and discovers Fay snorting blow and distraught with someone who looks to be a boyfriend.

There’s definitely something going on with this group that Jude and Alistair aren’t talking about. And when Georgia calls Holly in the middle of the night saying she needs help, Holly goes to where Georgia said she was and finds one of the clique bleeding in a bathtub.

Our Take: Clique, created by Jess Brittain (Skins) aired on BBC One in 2017, and did well enough to get a second season, which starts in the UK on November 10. Now it lands in the U.S. on Pop (where your TV Guide Channel grid used to scroll, if you want to know where it is); it’s certainly stylish and well-acted, and there’s plenty going on, even in the first hour of the six-part first season. But sometimes it feels like it’s playing its cards a little too close to the vest, even if there’s a lot of intrigue on the margins.

At a certain point, it feels like shows where teens or college kids are doing blow and molly, dancing at clubs and keeping secrets seem to blend together. But Clique stands out a bit for its setting (who knew Edinburgh had such a social scene?) and the clique itself. We know very little about the group, from Fay to the group’s seeming leader, Rachel Maddox (Rachel Hurd-Wood), to its hard-charging finance expert Louise Taggart (Sophia Brown) to the super-social Phoebe Parker-Fox (Ella-Rae Smith).

Through the first two episodes, we still don’t have too much of a handle on what they do to stay in the group, even after the reserved Elizabeth gives Holly a scouting report on all of them, much to Holly’s surprise. So their roles in each others’ lives and what Jude and Alistair have them there to do is still a bit of a mystery.

We had hoped that we’d find out a little more about that group, as it’s the “killer app” of this show. What we do find out about, via flashbacks, is how Georgia and Holly became close friends. What made Holly become a pariah in her friend group way back when? And what did Georgia see in her to befriend her? Brittain and her writers don’t really reveal that in the first two episodes, but it’ll be interesting to find out later on.

At the core of this season will be Holly and Georgia. Karlsen is great as the controlled, always suspicious Holly, who seems to be able to project her ambition to want in while being suspicious of Jude and her interns’ motivations. Cunningham is also winning as Georgia, who is impulsive and personable, but who doesn’t see the same red flags her friend does, and there’s no doubt that their friendship will pay the price for that blind spot.

Sex and Skin: Holly meets Sam while she’s outside the club smoking. She goes to his places and they have sex while she’s concerned over Georgia’s behavior. We see his tush but Holly keeps her bra on (though we see more of her in episode 2).

Parting Shot: While talking to Jude outside of the hospital where the person who slit her wrists was recovering, something happens that sets the tone for the entire first season (which we won’t spoil here).

Sleeper Star: We loved Brealey as the shy but smart coroner Molly Hooper in Sherlock, and she shines here as the smart and aggressive Jude McDermid. Something is going on with her, but she’s hiding it under a very tough exterior.

Most Pilot-y Line: It feels like we didn’t get enough about Holly and Georgia’s friendship up front, so it looks like Georgia is a person that Holly is always bailing out of trouble, when the dynamic likely cuts both ways.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It looks great, the acting is fantastic, and the idea behind the clique is unique.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Clique on Pop TV