Felicity Was Never Really About Ben or Noel

Let’s be honest: Felicity was marketed as a love triangle. Team Ben or Team Noel. The nice guy or the brooding jock. The sweet, steady friend or the emotionally unavailable crush. That was the pitch. But if you actually watched the show—really watched it—you know the truth: Felicity was never really about Ben or Noel. It was about Felicity. And how terrifying it is to try to become yourself when you don’t even know who that is yet.

The premise is famously impulsive: Felicity Porter, a sheltered, high-achieving high school student, ditches her pre-med plans at Stanford and moves across the country to New York—because the boy she liked signed her yearbook in a kind of flirty way.

It sounds like the beginning of a rom-com. But Felicity, which debuted in 1998 and ran for four emotionally turbulent seasons, doesn’t play it for laughs. It plays it for consequence. She doesn’t get to be quirky. She gets to be lost. And for once, the story stays with the girl who doesn’t have a plan.

What made Felicity so radical—especially in a TV landscape still shaped by the gloss of Dawson’s Creek and Beverly Hills, 90210—was how deeply it respected confusion.

The show didn’t care if Felicity was likable. It cared if she was real. She made bad decisions. She dated the wrong people. She cheated. She cried in the library. She chopped off her hair and sparked an actual TV ratings scandal. She flunked organic chemistry. She got mono. She slept with Noel. She broke Ben’s heart. She got hers broken back.

She was messy, neurotic, idealistic, selfish, soft. In other words: a girl in her early twenties. And while other shows might resolve those storylines in an episode, Felicity let everything simmer. It made room for fallout, growth, guilt, and forgiveness. It trusted its audience to sit in the grey.

Felicity’s voiceovers, recorded as cassette letters to her friend Sally, were the show’s secret weapon. They were raw, reflective, sometimes naïve, sometimes crushing. They didn’t tie the episodes into neat bows. They made everything feel lived-in. You weren’t watching a character wrap up a week of sitcom hijinks. You were listening to someone process, in real time, the disorienting task of becoming an adult.

Those voiceovers gave quiet weight to everyday moments: a professor doubting your worth, a crush texting someone else, a job interview that makes you question your major, a friend becoming a stranger or just the unbearable ache of being homesick without wanting to go home.

We can’t talk about Felicity without talking about The Haircut.

Midway through Season 2, Keri Russell cut her iconic curly hair into a short crop. And you’d think she burned the American flag. Network execs blamed the move for a drop in ratings, fans panicked, and to this day it’s still referenced as a cautionary tale about “branding.”

But in the context of the show, it made sense. It was a girl trying to reset her identity after everything in her life had fallen apart. And that’s what Felicity kept giving us: the right to change. To mess up. To start again. Even if it made you harder to recognise.

There’s a loneliness to Felicity that feels more honest than most college dramas.
New York isn’t romanticised—it’s vast, grey, sometimes isolating. The dorms aren’t glamorous. The bars are awkward. The friendships take effort. It’s not the college experience as fantasy. It’s college as becoming.

The show doesn’t rush to resolve things. It holds its characters in discomfort. It lets conversations go sideways. It lets feelings go unspoken. It gives you entire episodes that feel like a deep breath—or a panic attack. It was never afraid to be quiet. And that quiet is what made it hit so hard.

So, Team Ben or Team Noel? Honestly? Neither. Felicity was always at its best when it remembered that Felicity Porter was the main character, not a prize to be won.

She didn’t exist to choose between two men. She existed to choose herself—again and again, imperfectly, earnestly, with all the awkward steps and setbacks of a person trying to figure it out in real time.

If you haven’t watched it (or haven’t in years), Felicity is worth returning to. Not because of nostalgia—but because it’s still one of the most honest, gentle, and emotionally intelligent portrayals of young adulthood ever put on TV.

Because sometimes growing up doesn’t come with a clean arc. Sometimes it’s a whisper. A haircut. A letter you don’t send. A night you wish you could take back.
A version of you that no longer fits—but you miss her anyway. And Felicity gets all of that just right.