Florida Girls - the most fun you’ll have in front of the TV this summer - is now streaming first on Showmax.
Florida Girls stars series creator Laura Chinn as Shelby, the mother-figure of the group, who’s intent on bettering herself. Laci Mosley plays Jayla, whose big plan is to marry rich; Patty Guggenheim is stoner-klepto Erica; and Melanie Field plays the unapologetically change-resistant pack-leader Kaitlin.
“It’s four women who really don’t have any ambitions in life realising that they want to do more with their lives, all at the same time, and in very different ways... that are hilarious,” Laci says.
Florida Girls has an 85% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “A cleverly crass exploration of life in the sunshine state, Florida Girls is a perfect summer comedy with something to say.”
“You’ve never seen young women on TV like the Florida Girls,” says Vulture, which is exactly why Laura decided it was high time we did.
The show is based on Laura’s own experiences and the friends she grew up with. As she told BUILD, “When I first moved to LA, I would casually tell a story about growing up in Florida, that I thought was pretty mundane, and people in LA were like, ‘Whaat?’ We just got into crazy sh*t that I didn’t think was crazy until I got out of it, and then I was like, ‘Whoa’.”
“So a lot of it is taken from stories that have happened. I spent a long twelve years in Florida - a very unsupervised, no-parental-guidance twelve years, where we were just bumping into things and getting into all kinds of trouble, so every single episode has a nugget of a true story, and then we would take it and heighten it and extrapolate all that stuff.”
Laura, who grew up in the American South as the “white-looking” daughter of a black mom, has been praised for helping to rewrite the script on how women and black people are depicted in comedy.
In an interview with CBS News, Laura said, “One of the hurdles is that it’s hard for women to be flawed, and comedy is so hard to write unless somebody is very flawed. I’ve worked on shows where the women have to be really well-liked, and popular, and pretty, and well-dressed. These girls are none of those things... I mean, they’re pretty, but that’s about it,” she laughed. “The characters are messed up in a lot of ways.”
Similarly, Laci told BUILD, “It was so nice having Laura as a woman of colour on this set because this comedy is crazy and raunchy and as a black woman I feel so protective over black images in the media. I am so conscious of the fact that this character is so big. We wanted her to be big but we didn’t want her to be broad - not only is she not a representation of every single black woman, she is a person.”
“...We don’t have to show every single person on television being a shining example of blackhood in order for us to be worthy to be alive – which is where it comes from. It’s like, if we purport ourselves to be a certain way, maybe the police won’t kill us, you know what I mean? So it was so great to have Laura be so astute over this character and make her so smart. She’s flawed and she doesn’t know things but that doesn’t mean that she is a caricature of a human being.”
Listing it among the Best New Shows of Summer 2019, Time Magazine wrote, “For all its smart social commentary, the show is first and foremost a madcap comedy – one that makes a shrewd addition to the line-up of fresh, funny talent on Pop TV, an up-and-coming cable channel that Schitt’s Creek put on the map… With its raunchy, inventive humour and commitment to laughing with its characters more than at them, Florida Girls may well turn out to be the most enjoyable new show of the summer.”
Watch Florida Girls on Showmax: https://www.showmax.com/eng/