People Are In Love With ‘The Formal’, A TiKTok Series About Being Young And Queer In Australia
It's the queer love story we all wanted in high school.
We’re introduced to Hannah and Mon as the pair sit crossed legged on the ground, uniform clad as they flip open a purple binder, ‘The Formal’ emblazoned across the front in bubble letters.
“I can’t believe they’re making us plan formal in our lunch breaks,” says one.
“Oh, I don’t want to do this,” says the other in a cutaway shot to the camera, Parks and Rec style. “Mr Pearson thought we’d be good together.”
When creative duo Hannah-Rae Meegan and Monique Terry uploaded the first episode of their web series, The Formal, to TikTok back in February, the last thing they were expecting was for the video to blow up. Overnight, the minute long clip clocked hundreds of thousands of views and the pair gained 75 thousand followers. Comments flooded in from viewers keen to see more.
“Why am I obsessed… Netflix originals could never.”
“I yelled enemies to lovers without even looking at the description.”
“Mr Pearson knew what he was doing.”
Over 10 episodes, The Formal chronicles Meegan and Terry as fictionalised versions of themselves in a mockumentary style narrative, as they plan their Year 12 formal and ever so slowly find their newfound friendship developing into something more. Throughout the series, the pair are the only characters we actually see on camera, so the audience’s attention is focused solely on them.
We watch one minute snippets of their lunch breaks as the pair navigate Hannah’s coming out, Monique’s changing relationships with the boys in her life, and of course the plot to get the Hemsworths to make an appearance on the night of the formal. It’s got all the drama of regular high school, but without any of the stress.
“When Hannah was in high school someone ordered a bunch of pizzas to the school at lunch time and their punishment was to plan the formal. We just thought it was hilarious to have to organise the school formal as a punishment and from there the idea grew slowly into what it is now,” Terry explained.
The series came about after Screen Producers Australia and TikTok launched a competition where creators could submit a pilot for a web series and win some funding. Although the pair were runners up, there’s no doubt that The Formal has been a huge hit among queer users of the platform — the episodes have racked up almost 3 million views between them.
Even with the entirety of season 1 being just 10 minutes, The Formal was able to keep the audience on a knife’s edge as the “will they, won’t they” tension built between Hannah and Monique. The effortless familiarity with which the girls interact with each other really sells us on the authenticity of the characters’ relationship. Add in the familiar aesthetics of an Australian high school and the show makes me nostalgic for a high school experience I never had.
“We WISH we had a gorgeous steamy romance in high school but sadly neither of us did,” said Terry. “It’s inspired by our formals in the sense that looking back we thought it was the funniest time, so a lot of the humour is inspired by real events and the rest are just what we maybe wish happened. My formal was in the school gym and a couple of the mums told me my dress was “brave”, so I think that says everything about mine. Hannah’s was more of the night of nights that everyone wants, drinking mini champagnes on the Ferris Wheel at Luna Park.”
This isn’t the first project the girls have tackled. After they met in 2015 at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, they’ve teamed up to write and direct the short films ‘Slag’ and ‘Bring Me Back, Ma’, and their first web series aired last year on Instagram. GAYGirl and the Apocalypses was created in the first few weeks of lockdown last year, and follows the pair isolating in their sharehouse while tackling the pandemic and the changing nature of their relationship.
If The Formal is anything to go by, the pair have got the already huge queer market on TikTok absolutely cornered, and people are begging for more. Thankfully, this isn’t the last we’ve seen of them, with season 2 being written as we speak. The platform hasn’t seen many successful web series yet, so it’s delightful that queer Australian creatives are leading the way, bringing us content that my little lesbian heart craves.
You can watch season 1 of The Formal on TikTok.
Lydia Jupp is a freelance journalist who writes about gender, queerness, culture, and politics. You can find more of her work and an abundance of youthful existential crises over on her Twitter @lydiarosejupp.