Their Surprise Route to Popularity

MTV’s ‘Faking It’ Stars Katie Stevens and Rita Volk

By MIKE HALE

Katie Stevens with Rita Volk in the series "Faking It."

In sitcoms, it’s been the season of the embarrassing dad. Michael J. Fox, Robin Williams, Christopher Meloni, J. K. Simmons, Beau Bridges, Martin Mull and Peter Riegert have all played lovably messed-up fathers in new shows. (That could be the cast of a pretty good production of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”)

Now, late in the season, comes a small but noticeable cluster of comedies centered on transgressive, sometimes embarrassing women. CBS’s “Bad Teacher,” on Thursday, based on the film of the same title, is about a gold-digging ex-trophy wife who takes a high school teaching job to find a new husband. In USA’s “Playing House,” next Tuesday, the writer-actors Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair reprise their self-absorbed, pushing-40 fun-girl act from “Best Friends Forever.”

Katie Stevens with Gregg Sulkin in "Faking It."

If any of these shows are genuinely subversive, however, it’s probably MTV’s “Faking It,” on Tuesday. The network’s latest attempt to get another scripted teenage comedy off the ground (so far “Awkward” has been its only notable success), the series is set in a fantasy version of Austin, Tex., where a high school’s overprivileged mean girl can fume that she’s being discriminated against.

Katie Stevens and Rita Volk star as Karma and Amy, best friends desperate to crack their school’s inner social circle. (As usual, there’s no obvious reason — looks, charm, body mass — why they shouldn’t already be there.) Karma is the more desperate of the two, and the show opens with her latest scheme, to generate sympathy by pretending to have been blinded by a sudden-onset brain tumor.

Within a few minutes of screen time, a better solution falls into their laps: They’re mistaken for a lesbian couple, and Karma realizes that they should play along: Being a brave, public same-sex couple in liberal Austin makes them instant celebrities.

That’s enough of a hook to make the show stand out, but it takes a further step (spoiler alert here) by making one of the girls realize that maybe she’s not just playacting her new sexual orientation. It’s a slightly melodramatic twist, though it raises the stakes from teenage farce to something with a little more emotional resonance.

“Faking It” isn’t anything more than a smarter-than-average high school comedy, but there’s a freshness to it, perhaps because so many of the key people involved are relative newcomers. It’s the first series for both Ms. Stevens, an “American Idol” finalist, and Ms. Volk. The show’s creators, Dana Goodman and Julia Lea Wolov, are young actresses whose previous writing experience included stints together on the reality show “Punk’d” and the David Gordon Green cartoon “Good Vibes,” both for MTV.

And for ballast, there’s the executive producer and writer Carter Covington, who worked on the ABC Family comedy “10 Things I Hate About You.” His script for the “Faking It” pilot has a snap and cleverness reminiscent of that earlier show.

“I was you once, so terrified of rejection that it took me forever to come out,” a new best friend tells the reluctant faux-lesbian Amy. “But once I did, fourth grade got so much better.”

Faking It
MTV, Tuesday nights at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time.
Created by Carter Covington; Mr. Covington, executive producer.
WITH: Katie Stevens (Karma), Rita Volk (Amy), Gregg Sulkin (Liam), Michael Willett (Shane) and Bailey Buntain (Lauren).