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‘Little Voice’ Review: Sweet AppleTV+ Dramedy Wants to Fill the ‘Felicity’ Vacuum In Your Life
A curly-haired young female protagonist with expressively full eyebrows and artistic ambitions. A New York City setting. A pair of suitors, each achingly perfect for her in his own way. And J.J. Abrams among the executive producers. …No, the new AppleTV+ dramedy Little Voice is not exactly Felicity. But it might fit a Felicity-shaped hole in your heart.
Co-created by Sara Bareilles and Jessie Nelson, re-teaming after their collaboration on Broadway’s Waitress, Little Voice stars Brittany O’Grady as Bess. She lives with her best friend Prisha (Shalini Bathina), who plays in an all-female mariachi band and reluctantly goes on dates arranged by her loving but pushy Indian-immigrant parents (Sakina Jaffrey and Samrat Chakrabarti). Bess compulsively writes soulful pop songs but is too scared to perform them for an audience since a bad experience at an open-mic. But she does sing for the joy of it — to soothe her Broadway-loving brother Louie (Kevin Valdez), or joining in when she finds her father Percy (Chuck Cooper) busking with his a cappella quartet.
Bess is working on a song in the storage unit she’s tricked out as a low-fi studio when she’s interrupted by her new neighbor, Ethan (Sean Teale), a director who’s turned his unit into a video post-pro facility. They get to know each other over snacks and Scrabble, and when he later finds her at the bar where she works, just as a musical act falls out, she impetuously decides to take the slot — in the process crossing paths with Samuel (Colton Ryan), a guitarist who helps her set up and says he’ll be rooting for her. Bess chokes again… then gets offstage, where Ethan introduces her to his girlfriend Laila (Ismenia Mendes). Bess pushes past that disappointment: she’s rekindled her commitment to her music career.
