Review: Highly Gifted “Dave on the verge of a nervous breakdown”

Snapchat’s first original animated series is relatable, funny and a surprisingly perfect fit for its platform.

A few years ago, at the Golden Globes, Amy Poehler joked that Snapchat would eventually win the award for Best Drama Series. It’s a comment that feels unexpectedly prescient to me today, as I realized just how rapid the rise of streaming services has been. So here we are: Highly Gifted, Snapchat’s first original animated series has officially premiered. One episode in, I’m tentatively impressed.

Created by the awesome Lehrer brothers and starring Josh Brener of Silicon Valley (one of my favorite non‑animated comedies), it would be easy to assume sight unseen Highly Gifted’s focus on young people is a cynical appeal to Snapchat’s primary users; however, the first episode pleasantly surprised me by feeling effortlessly human. Brener’s shy and nerdy Dave is at a restaurant with his classmate/crush Emma and were given the perfect amount of exposition to capture the 21st-century idea that ‘this isn’t a date, but it could be’ without killing the pace.

The pacing was one of my greatest concerns before watching Highly Gifted since I was unsure of the exact format the show would use. Snapchat obviously began as a service for sharing content that was quickly and easily viewed, so a series aspiring to the lengths of a network animated sitcom, let alone a streaming show, would’ve been a risk. Thankfully, the first episode ran somewhere between three and four minutes including (brief) ads, which ended up being enough to tell a solid story while leaving me keen for more.

It should also be noted that the show is seriously funny, with laughs stemming equally from its relatability and healthy doses of absurd humor. Plenty of people will chuckle at Dave’s struggle of trying to be romantic on a razor‑thin budget, but the sequence depicting his spiralling internal monologue is made even better with a genius touch: the class Dave and Emma take together is Spanish, so naturally the voiceover here is also performed in rapid Spanish, providing the same melodrama as a classic telenovela.

I hadn’t subscribed to a Discover feed on Snapchat in years, but Highly Gifted finally convinced me to do so again. With its simple premise hopefully allowing for heaps of creative stories, and a clear understanding of what it should do to stand out on its platform, I’m certainly optimistic about its future.