To the pearl-clutching, garden-manicuring, stuffy suburban residents of Chatswin, nearby East Chatswin is a lawless ghetto. But it’s actually just one town over, where the houses are slightly smaller, the lawns slightly less green, and where a feminist played by Rachel Dratch moves when Chatswin ostracizes her. In the first season, when Jane Levy’s Tessa searches for a scooter to allow her more independence, she brings her best friend Lisa along to check out a possibility from Craigslist. Once walking along the streets of the perfectly normal suburb—it even had garden gnomes!—Lisa offers Tessa a cigarette, as they have crossed to other side of the tracks. Add to that Dalia’s brief transfer to East Chatswin High in the second season, where she gets bullied by similarly vapid girls for what she perceives as an inferior tan, and East Chatswin forms another useful metaphor for the sheltered atmosphere of privileged suburban life.
