Hey Purple State Progressive readers! This is Sam bringing you our second guest post and first from a great, longtime friend of Josh and myself. If I had a nickel for every time Josh, Jacob, and I debated about Midwestern and national politics while drinking Diet Pepsi and playing Xbox I’d have a gunny sack full of nickels. And if I had a nickel for every time we discussed college football, specifically Iowa Hawkeye football, then all three of use would have tickets to the Iowa-Wisconsin game in Camp Randall (*cough* possible future post topic hint, Mr. Knobbe *cough*). But Jacob’s talents expand extensively into an area that I can’t touch myself: tv series, music, and movie analysis. Today, Jacob provides analysis for one of Netflix’s new series that’s hot off the presses. Enjoy!

There was one thought I kept revisiting, somewhere between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. as I let Netflix know that, yes, I was still watching their new teen thriller 13 Reasons Why: this show has no damn business being any good.

To call the premise ‘convoluted’ is an enormous generosity: 17 year-old Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford in her literal first ever role) commits suicide, leaving behind a series of 13 cassette tapes calling out the 13 people responsible for her death. The tapes bounce around the usual High School Suspects; from jock to cheerleader to jock to yearbook photographer to jock until eventually landing in the hands of perpetually moody and perplexed Nice Boy Clay Jensen (played by most recent product of the Miles Teller/Logan Lerman/Nat Wolff factory, Dylan Minnette). The pilot sets the series a Herculean task, pacing out 13 hour-long episodes, each focusing on a different character, without losing momentum and trying to heighten the stakes at every turn. Then you have the cast: Minette has had recent turns in Don’t Breathe and Goosebumps, but you’re hard-pressed to find a recognizable name or face in the bunch. Oh, and kids! ALL YOUR SCENES ARE ABOUT LOVE OR DEATH OR ASSAULT OR BULLYING OR THE ABSOLUTE LIMITS OF YOUR OWN EMPATHY VIS A VIS THE ABILITY TO EVER TRULY KNOW ANYONE!

So the show is frequently a trainwreck. It occasionally becomes so gummed up in angst and self-loathing that every character on-screen is nearly unwatchable. There are scenes of (trigger-warned) self-harm and sexual assault that border on pornographic, and at several times during the latter half of the series I genuinely felt sick to my stomach. The series almost certainly could have been told just as well in 8 hours vs 12, as some of the middle episodes get bogged down in needless bait-switching and fantasy sequences. I promise there will be times where the dialogue will cause your eyes to hurt from rolling them.

Here’s the thing though: when it’s not busy being any of that, it’s busy being the best teen drama of the 21st century.

PART I – JUST KISS ALREADY JESUS CHRIST

13 Reasons is bleak and dark and sickening when it wants to be. Kate Walsh and Brian d’Arcy James are phenomenal as Hannah’s grieving parents, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the school over their daughter’s death. The show doesn’t shy away from rape or suicide or drug abuse, and I would genuinely advise against anyone sensitive to those triggers from watching several episodes (trigger warnings are provided before these ones).

For balance’s sake, then, the show needs a heck of a light side to right the scales, and the young leads in Langford and Minnette do their best work with what could’ve easily become standard Nice Guy/Cool Girl fodder. With Minnette spending so much of the series in Harry-Potter-circa-Order-of-the-Phoenix mode, reacting to every situation by brooding or demanding answers or yelling about being **miSunDeRsToOd**, watching him earnestly, haplessly flirt is such a joyful change of pace. The will-they/won’t-they dynamic never feels dragged out, and each set-back seems earned. It’s the one thing the audience absolutely has to buy for the show to work: we need Hannah to have had at least one good and pure thing. We need to know that Clay is torturing himself in pursuit of the truth because of something meaningful. We need the teeny tiny lil umbrella of love in the torrential downpour of sadness and grief.

PART II – LETTING TEENS BE DUMB

A distressing development in today’s social media atmosphere is that of the flashback post: Facebook cutely invoking your nostalgia by sharing whatever post you made on this date X number of years ago. Three years since we got married! Half a decade knowing my buddy Christian! Two years since that infamous “antonin scalia retire bitch” status that cost you your job. Here’s a fun game – scroll down to the very beginning of your timeline and read any of the posts that you thought were worth posting in 2008. Spoiler alert: they are insanely bad. This doesn’t say anything about current-day-you or past-you, of course! Just that, probably, you used to be slightly dumber than you currently are. In 13 Reasons this is reflected in all of our young cast: Hannah’s voice leads off an episode confidently and incorrectly explaining Chaos Theory. Clay misunderstands nearly all the lessons Hannah and the tapes are trying to teach him, opting instead for a campaign of eye-for-an-eye vigilantism that feels so right for a dopey lovestruck crusader.

This, I think, is why the characters felt genuine to me. I didn’t go to a school with such a stereotypical social hierarchy, there weren’t roving gangs of jocks who would pants kids in the halls. But I felt like I was watching kids who were dumb in the same way I was dumb at 16. Who were so unable to talk about how they felt like I was, who fucked up and KNEW they fucked up like I did.

PART III – AESTHETIC

Purely from an eyeball stand-point, the show is simply a blast to watch. Flashbacks are always super easy to track as the color palette shifts from warm to cool, as future-Clay winds his way in and out of the past seamlessly. There are countless visual homages to the John Hughes films of the 80s, to Say Anything (Minnette and Langford look a LOT like John Cusack and Ione Skye, respectively), to its genre counterparts in Heathers and Riverdale. The soundtrack helps hearken back to the 80s as well, featuring a GNR cover and Joy Division to further evoke the golden age of teen cinema. There are also several clever ways the cinematography reinforces the story, shots hitting a focal point, sitting, and rotating 360 degrees about the character as Hannah’s voice over talks about there being “13 sides to every story.” I outright gasped at the final shot of the pilot. It’s real pretty.

I can’t imagine that, should you watch 13 Reasons Why, it will be a Thing you feel half-way about. It’s an enormously ambitious, thoroughly flawed monster that does not allow for casual viewing. It’s an effort to have a serious talk about teen suicide, rape culture, bullying, and empathy within the confines of a psuedo-legal thriller format. It has some of my favorite shots and sequences I’ve ever seen on television alongside some that I probably could not bring myself to watch again. These contrasting elements, though, didn’t average each other out: simultaneously I feel grateful for what the show did well and furious at it for not being better. You will feel everything and know very little. And that, I think, is worth watching for.