JESSICA’S TRASH

Jessica Wilson is doing just fine. She’s got a perfectly fine job, where she makes a perfectly fine salary, which allows her to live a pefectly fine life in a perfectly fine apartment on a perfectly fine tree-lined Brooklyn street with her perfectly fine boyfriend Jesse. Other than that, she has two perfectly fine best friends, Cassie and Chris, who she met nearly twenty years ago at their perfectly fine law school, and she meets up with them with perfectly fine frequency to drink one or two or three or four (or five) bottles of perfectly fine wine, which has a funny way of making everything seem, for a few hours at least, really super extra perfectly fine. And then there’s her perfectly fine, slightly-less-than-best-friend, Leslie, who’s really rich and very much a bitch who might have also married Jessica’s ex-boyfriend Alex, who Jessica really kinda might still be in love with...but all that water under the bridge at this is point, and Jessica is of course — what else? — perfectly fine with it. Other than that, she’s got a perfectly fine relationship with her perfectly fine Mom and Dad, who she speaks to every Sunday morning and every Wednesday evening — only then, and never not then — which is an arrangement that is, for all parties involved, perfectly fine. 

And well, that’s about it for Jessica. Oh sure, sometimes her perfectly fine life feels a little small; a little constrained; a little less, somehow, than what she was imgaining it would all be. But what does that even mean? What would she change, really? What would she do differently, actually? What would possibly make her life feel more or better or different than the perfectly fine she’s always known? Who can say? Certainly not Jessica. All that being said, the trouble with a life that’s perfectly fine is that over time, it tends to be defined by what it’s not: not terrible; not great; not difficult; not easy; not fun; not dull...not, not, not. And when your life starts to be more defined by not this and not that rather than yes this! and yes that!, there’s an awful, terrible tendency for everything to start to feel like, well, nothing at all: nothing to complain about; nothing to write home about; nothing terrible; nothing special; nothing bad, nothing good; nothing much; nothing to see here.

But whenever that peculiar emptiness hits (which is all the time), Jessica has a fantastic little trick up her sleeve to turn all those nothing-nothing-nothings into something-something-somethings. It couldn’t be easier, and best of all: it really works. Every time. Hell, you don’t even have to leave your house anymore to do it — in fact, it’s arguably better if you don’t! So what is this magical mystery housebound cure-all for modern malaise??? Simple: she goes shopping.

Fine! Good! Great! Whatever! You might be saying. A little retail therapy? Classic. Except for Jessica, it’s a little more than the occasional late-night purchase on Amazon (it was Prime Day!). For Jessica it’s, umm...well...more like...how do you say...a. Full. On. Fucking. Shopping. Addiction. If Jessica’s ennui is bottomless, her bank account certainly is not, and over the course of the past twenty perfectly fine years, despite her perfectly fine income, she accidentally racked up a not-so-perfectly fine quarter-mil’ in credit card debt. Oops! But can she stop? No she certainly cannot. And with that much new merch’ coming in daily, you gotta clear the old inventory out, so Jessica is constantly (like, literally every day) throwing out piles (heaps!) of sublimely random old shit to make space for all the piles of sublimely random new shit that made her feel — for a second, for an instant — something other than just perfectly fine.

Spanning a roughly twenty year period from the late nineties (Jessica’s early twenties) through to the present day (her mid-forties), the show is both an indictment of the rapacious consumerism that has become normalised and even valorised as self care (“Treat yourself!), and an extended meditation on the strange season of life where slowly at first, and then all at once, you find yourself irreversibly in the thicket of middle age, saddled by a few decades of accumulated choices and experiences, looking very much like the person you’re going to be — even if it’s not the person you wanted or intended to become. 

Each episode takes as its focus one item (or set of related items) purchased by Jessica, then checks in on her life at critical junctures vis-a-vis that particular item, ultimately following its full life cycle from acquisition, regular use, declining use, outright disuse, all the way to its inevitable trashing—which will be how every episode ends. While every episode will be a largely self-contained story centred around the item in question, over the course of the first season, a fuller picture of Jessica’s life from young adulthood to early middle age will come into view, and with that, an understanding of how and why she came to be so dependent on things to give her life meaning. As Jessica attempts to divest herself of her material possessions and claw herself out from under a mountain of debt, for the first time ever, she begins to confront the source of her dysfunctional spending, and with that, finds a path to a different kind of life: one that is more than just perfectly fine.

Like Jessica herself, the items that are featured in each episode are generally unremarkable, but when placed in context into the sweep of Jessica’s life, they become something much more: a CD single of a hit pop ballad from the late 90s is the soundtrack to and touchstone of a first, lost, and possibly only true love; a broken fax machine and a scuffed pair of high heels stand in for aborted professional potential; a dog-eared neo-Gothic romance novel portends a quiet psychic unravelling; a violent video game stands in for a life-wide failure to launch and the gradual evacuation of passion from a long-term relationship; a little black dress that no longer fits represents the awkward negotiation of physical ageing and the looming spectre of one’s own mortality; and an (unread) self-help book alludes to the impossibility of having a family in the way that once seemed not only possible but inevitable. Far from being a collection of unused or unwanted remnants discarded from the margins of her existence, the detritus of Jessica’s life actually tells the story of who she really is.