Effie Trinket is going to college.
Unlike “The Hunger Games” franchise, this band of telegenic young people chosen to cohabitate are more concerned with the baby-making end of the lifecycle than the gruesome violent death terminus.
Elizabeth Banks and husband Max Handelman executive produce “Resident Advisors,” a new comedy following a corps of resident advisors at a fictional college herding and navigating a dorm of hormonal freshmen roughly their same age.
Paramount Digital Entertainment premiered the first two episodes at the Sherry Lansing Theater on the Paramount lot on Tuesday night.
In “Resident Advisors”, Jamie Chung (as the tightly wound dorm head) is tasked with shepherding a drug-wielding staff of promiscuity cheerleaders on her R.A. staff that are as much a part of the problem as they are the solution.
Vanessa Lengies (“Glee”) stands out as a psycho ex-girlfriend to Dax Shepard look-alike Ryan Hansen (“Burning Love”), stealing scenes and plot from outside the core five cast.
Producer/director Ira Ungerleider (“Angie Tribeca”, “Friends”, “How I Met Your Mother”) called Lengies after working with her on Ryan Seacrest’s short-lived ABC series “Mixology” last year.
“Historically, it’s been hard to sell a college comedy,” Ungerleider told TheWrap over red wine and Kogi BBQ on the lot after the screening.
“People think it’s too specific, that people won’t relate, so there’s been very few of them. Even Judd Apatow tried with ‘Undeclared.’ Now with this new universe of Hulu, and Amazon, and Netflix, you get to do that college comedy which is so great because it’s such an amazing time in your life.”
Graham Rogers, equal parts Stifler and Barney Stinson (from Ungerleider’s other comedy work on “How I Met Your Mother”), is the other breakout.
Despite Banks’ “Hunger Games” fan base, the biggest media star in the cast is Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor, the first generation Vine star who rode his rapid-fire cellphone cam punchlines to 11.5 million followers before getting snatched up by mainstream Hollywood.
Unfortunately, he plays the straight man here.
The most pure comic is given the least comedy on the page, at least from the sample size of two episodes screened on Tuesday night.
They shot this show on the L.A. campus of Emerson College last summer from scripts co-written by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a former Emerson College R.A. herself who is making her first television project.
For those with No-Chella plans, all 7 episodes debut on Hulu next Thursday, April 9.