What is the American dream of the 21st century? Is it running one's own company and finally experiencing financial success? Is it being a part of the melting pot, with friends from all corners of the cultural landscape? Is it living in a scrappy apartment on the Lower East Side while working on Fifth Avenue, going out for sushi and partying with fashion models and art gallery owners? Is it finally paying a sketchy cousin back and escaping without a broken arm?
HBO's "How to Make It in America" is like a hipster scrapbook of New York City's unsung, struggling dreamers. The new series is yet another HBO entry — like last year's "Hung" — with a genre that is difficult to crack. Rather than being a comedy or a drama, it's more like a visual experiment: part documentary and part music video. Every minute, however, paints a landscape, using indelible images of areas all around New York City and from all walks of life to present its version of the American dream.
Principally, "How to Make It" follows Ben Epstein (Bryan Greenberg), an affably handsome design school dropout looking to finally make his mark. He and his best friend, Cam (Victor Rasuk), decide to "f−−k the man" — whatever that means — and start their own denim fashion line called Crisp NYC. To do it, they borrow money from Cam's cousin Rene (veteran character actor Luis Guzmán), who has recently been released from prison, and they make plans to beat the odds.
Ben and Cam are not the only characters with business in mind. Even the soulful theme song, Aloe Blacc's "I Need A Dollar," makes it clear that the characters think that "making it" happens on monetary terms. Rene decides to enter the legitimate business world by distributing an energy drink called Rasta Monsta. Ben's friend Gingy (Shannyn Sossamon) sells photos in her art gallery in order to remain financially independent from her rich father. David (Eddie Kaye Thomas), who knew Ben in high school, works for a hedge fund and lives in a lush uptown apartment.
David, in his own opinion, has not achieved the American dream. He's a self−described "loudmouth Jew" who hires call girls to shop at Barneys with him and pays Ben and Cam $3,000 to convince a club's doorman that he's cool. David thinks that Ben and Cam have it all: the hip, multiethnic friends, the streetwise authenticity and the downtown sensibilities. Though Blacc sings about money in the opening credits, the images that accompany the music combine New York iconography and colorful portraits of people to depict the city as a hipster paradise. The imagery subtly says that if one experiences this New York, one actually has "made it."
The show's light touch works for its visual component, but the writing is equally breezy to a fault. The jokes don't go far enough to tease out a laugh, and the drama doesn't dive deep enough to create an emotional connection with the characters. There's plenty of theme, but there isn't enough plot to drive each episode. A lack of back story also means it's not a character−driven show; these people only exist in a moment in time.
"How to Make It" hints that some events in the characters' lives have affected them — Ben's on−and−off relationship with Rachel (Lake Bell), for instance, or Cam's supposedly difficult childhood — but the show never reveals any details. Most exposition that's not doled out in the loose dialogue comes in the form of rapid flashes of photographs or images that supply names to faces or fill in gaps in time. This conceit is artsy and clever, but it can't sustain a long−form serial show forever.
The best way to describe "How to Make It in America" to someone who's never seen it is to liken it to Jay−Z and Alicia Keys' music video for "Empire State of Mind" (2009). "How to Make It" is deft with quick cuts, iconic imagery and an admirably firm grip on its visual representation of New York. Even if the show's storylines feel as if they — and the characters — are running in place, the tone and colors of the city lend it a kind of buoyancy and profundity.
The city in "How to Make It" is a rich, multiracial wonderland of crime and family, fashion and scrappy idealism. Maybe the city's centrality provides an answer to the question of the "how" in the series' title. After all, there is a rumor that if someone can make it there, they can make it anywhere.
