When this TV series first debuted, I found myself instantly disliking it, mostly because of the dialogue. I saw it weak from a story perspective, with a plot that was unfathomably drawn out and some very poor performances. My mother and some of my siblings binged the whole season, and I can to some extent understand why. The shows ability to be honest regarding how some people view sexual assault, rape, and suicide, was I think what drew attention in the first place.
That said, and this is in no means an attack on those who enjoyed the first season or the second (which I refuse to watch, as there should never have been thirteen episodes of this show, let alone two seasons) it is a well-dressed piece of garbage.
The acting is not strong enough to carry the weight of the subjects, the leads are boring at best and aside from a couple moments, the villains are cartoonish. The pacing is ruined by the length of the episodes and the number of them. We spend ten minutes each episode, with Troy hounding someone and asking them about Hannah, them refusing to talk to him, and him finding out the truth. It doesn’t even make any sense when there’s a good character who knows what happened and could tell Troy everything but refuses to. Many of the “reasons” aren’t even that bad or seem just thrown in there, without being truly connected to the tragic events later in the season.
While it dives headfirst into heavy subjects, the writing is like driftwood, floating along the surface of a deep, dark ocean. The writing displays no ambition for probing those depths. It skims the surface of every subject it can, systematic misogyny, mental illness, bullying, suicide, grief, but it doesn’t bring us to any kind of realization. It doesn’t have an epiphany waiting, there’s no realization, and there’s no attempt to have a meaningful discussion about these subjects because the characters are so two-dimensional.
There’s a scene, where one of the “bad guys” tells all the other “bad guys” what their problems is, individually. IT HAS NO SUBTLETY. IT’S TREATING ITS AUDIENCE LIKE THEY ARE IDIOTS.
But the worst thing about this show, the reason why it is so bad, is because it exemplifies every trope about high school and high schoolers that I know. The whole thing has cardboard cutout characters in a cardboard cutout world, trying to talk about real, painful problems in the world. Oh look, the jocks are sexist assholes who can get away with anything! Oh look, the cheerleaders are bullying someone! And what’s this? Why, the lonely, thoughtful teenagers are the good guys, because they’re keeping it real when everyone else is obsessed with popularity! Except for the really bullied kid, because he’s ready to shoot up a school.
The teenagers are like the breakfast bunch, without the character development. The adults are the stereotypes that teenagers think of when they imagine that adults don’t understand what they are going through. The subject matter is a way too sensitive and important, for you, the writer to be slacking off with this lazy world-building. If you want to be blunt about suicide and rape, fine. But you have your plot revolve around stereotypes that were passé in a Disney channel sitcom ten years ago.
It's puerile, edgy, angsty trash. And I know that because I wrote puerile, edgy, angsty trash when I was younger and in a worse mental state. And that would be fine, it would be fine if the show was just trashy. But you can’t mix heavy subjects with such sub-par storytelling because it insults the victims of those issues. You have to try harder than that if you want to talk about these things because it is painful to depict them alongside such empty characters.
The only good thing about season 1 of the show, was that the music choices were sometimes okay if you are into thoughtful indie rock like I am. And I like bikes.
But please let this show die after the third season. Its little more than a soulless cash-grab based on the exploitation of romanticized teenage angst. And that’s horrible.
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