eliza dooley and henry higgs had the potential to be one of the best television couples in history, but were not given the appropriate amount of time to develop their relationship thoroughly due to selfie's early cancelation. in this essay, i will–

SELFIE 1.02 BROOKLYN NINE-NINE 6.15

And be with me for evermore

Eliza/Henry & Lacey/Gold parallels

it's a call and response

it's a call and response

IT'S A CALL AND RESPONSE!!!!!

alan jay lerner i want to shake you by your collar and scream at the top of my lungs because somehow despite my deep and abiding love for this musical i did not understand until harry hadden-paton's delivery of this line and the actual script in front of my eyes that it's. a CALL AND RESPONSE!!!!

Higgins + learning to accept Eliza flowers in his life.

What’s the matter? Anything wrong? 

WENDY HILLER and LESLIE HOWARD in BERNARD SHAW’S PYGMALION (1938) | dir. ANTHONY ASQUITH

Bob takling about Eliza being addicted to children's playgrounds and how he always gets worried about her and Henry (via ohsupernaturall on Tiwtter)

The Morley’s 2023 (part 2)

Selfie (2014) - Henry & Eliza moment

Artist: velpro

rewatched SELFIE for the first time since it first aired and im still mad at ABC for cancelling it.

it may not have been perfect but it was fun, silly and deserved more than one season.

Eliza Dooley and Henry Higgs were such great characters!

Karen Gillan and John Cho were so good!

i miss this show and i want it back!

i want Eliza Dooley, Henry Higg, Charmonique and that office full of weirdo's back!

im also mad at yall for not watching the show because the title was too "polarizing."... at least that's what was said about why people weren't watching it.

I wanted to practice drawing HHP since I’m still not very good at capturing his likeness, so here’s a close up based on My Fair Lady’s final scene. 

Totally didn’t spend the whole night working on this instead of sleeping haha

My Fair Lady is one of my favourite shows (I first saw it when I was about 3 and there is photographic evidence of me dressing up as Eliza and dancing around singing "I could have danced all night" from about that age; not much has changed) and I saw it in London last night, first professional production.

I have mixed feelings about the production tbh but it's made me think about how MFL really is very confused about what it's trying to say and do as a show and how it's presenting its central relationship between Higgins and Eliza. I've always been a shameless Henry/Eliza shipper (don't worry - I've been told off about this quite enough, thank you!!) but they're definitely problematic. Or maybe it was just this production in which I didn't really know what they were trying to achieve.

The first problem is Henry being a raging misogynist. He doesn't really change. He comes to understand how important Eliza is to him by the end of the show and we certainly understand his perspective more and see aspects of its validity - that he treats everyone the same, his genuine belief in speech as a way to level class distinctions, and so on. But still by the end he never really faces up to what his feelings for Eliza mean - as can obviously be seen in the very fact that "I've grown accustomed to her face" is famously a love song without the word love in it. Henry is not yet ready to admit he is in love with Eliza or deal with the cataclysmically life-shifting implications of that. The fact that what he says to Eliza at the end of the show is "What the devil have you done with my slippers?" proves that he has not yet changed. Not that he is incapable of change but he is not yet there.

There's also the fact that he can be really quite unpleasant and that has to be shown for absurdity or it just makes him ultra dislikeable. His first song "I'm an ordinary man" is deeply uncomfortable if played straight. My mother once said that the only time she could deal with that song and didn't actively dislike the show was when she watched my school production and Henry was played by a teenage girl. That casting alone showed all the absurdity of his position and the song, but productions with an adult male Henry have to do that as well. It also means that we actually need Henry to be completely ruined by the end of the show. He... kind of has to be completely head over heels in love with Eliza! If he wins, if he is allowed to continue smugly in his existence, not really changing, then it's deeply unsatisfactory. Not to go too Aristotelian on you all, but he needs some serious peripeteia going on for the audience to be invested in him. If he starts the show with deeply unpleasant and absurd misogynistic ideas then all of this needs to be completely and utterly destroyed by the end. He needs to be absolutely laid low by Eliza and her victory over him. But a lot of productions don't push Henry so far and the script itself and its ending don't help.

I thought the London 2022 production actually did Henry really well, played by Harry Hadden-Paton. They made him young, which was excellent. Young men can be pedantic misogynists as much as old ones! And it made his romantic feelings towards Eliza much more palatable. He played the development of his feelings very naturally. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but at the beginning around "I'm an ordinary man" he almost came off as defensive and alone, using extreme views about women to hide his inability to understand or deal with women. I felt that was a really interpretation and I wish they'd pushed it further and makes much more sense if Henry's younger and inexperienced than in an older man. (More could have been done with Pickering and his reactions, but that's another story.) Later on, there are a few moments when he clearly has a physical interest in Eliza but doesn't quite know what to do about it- subtle, but present. And he's clearly bowled over by her appearance before the ball. The best moment was in his confrontation in his mother's greenhouse where Eliza says she isn't interested in him romantically "and that's just how you feel about me" and he's like "uh, yes, definitely". It got a laugh. I loved that. This production realised Henry had to be fully in love with Eliza for it to be satisfying and also that he had to be destroyed by it, which is the ending worked, in which he was left alone to grapple with his defeat.

But while Henry on his own was masterful, Eliza was problematic. What does Eliza feel? The script is so contradictory! Eliza is attracted to Henry. "I could have danced all night" spells this out. And this production gave her a delightful moment during "The rain in Spain" where she touched her heart in surprise after dancing with Henry and didn't have time to think about it before Henry is sweeping her off again, denying Pickering a chance to dance with her because he wants to. Very nicely done. And fine. We watch Eliza's growing feelings and her deep frustration because Henry is incapable of reciprocating in any kind of sensible way. But then what to do with what she says to Henry in the greenhouse? She very clearly spells out that she isn't interested in him romantically but "more friendly-like". But that really isn't justified by what the text says previously or her utter disdain for Freddy. (I always think it would be interesting to play "Words words words" as being really addressed to Henry and Freddy just happens to be there.) Either Eliza is in denial about her feelings about Henry or she is determined to squash them because he's so annoying (valid) or she's really got over them, as suggested in "Without you" ("What a fool I was,what a dominated fool, to think you were the earth and sky!"). But if she actually has got over him then WHY DOES SHE GO BACK TO HIM AT THE END? It makes no sense. You see why I find the script itself problematic and contradictory? This production played it as if she was acknowledging his feelings but saying a proper goodbye which was an interesting and not awful decision, but it rang a bit hollow. Why would she do that if she really didn't need him and was as done with him as was suggested in the previous scene? But if you play it as if Eliza was returning to him properly, then it's also unsatisfactory because he hasn't changed properly and she's just said she can stand on her own. They're not there yet!

The best production I saw was a student production in Cambridge when they just went hard on the romance. They conveyed subtext and longing and ended with a passionate kiss when she came back. It worked because they built a completely convincing counter narrative running underneath the script. But I felt like this production didn't quite know what it was doing, mainly with Eliza's feelings.

I suppose the good thing is that I now really want to write post-show fanfiction with torturously slow burn that allows both Henry and Eliza to grow fully as the production teased but the show never allowed them to rise to.

I'll always love My Fair Lady but damn, it's a deceptively tricky show.

Father's day is this Sunday, June 19th, which means we can probably expect Eliza to post some super adorable Bob/Henry photos 🥰

Hi, I saw on your post /668440219491729408 that you were wondering about the meaning of that Selfie scene. Eliza was blowing a kiss that was supposed to be for Freddy, but Henry thought it was for him. So after Henry caught Eliza's kiss, he tried to recover from embarrassment by making a fist pump to hide it :)

Ahh I see! Poor Henry- he thought her kiss was for him but then saw Freddy catch it as well and then figured it was for him 🥺 Thank you for explaining it :)