[Disclaimer: This review contains some spoilers. If you do not wish to read spoilers, skip the “The Bad” section.]

Netflix’s drama series 13 Reasons Why delves into the theme of high school bullying and its role in teenage suicide. The sensitive and highly relevant material gives the series a lot of promise, but plenty of shortcomings keep it from hitting the mark.

Before taking her own life, high schooler Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) tells her story through a narration of thirteen events that drive her to commit suicide, each of which she records on a side of a cassette tape. In the first tape she gives out her instructions: that each person on the tape must listen to all thirteen recordings and then pass them on to the next one, or else a certain trusted person will release the tapes to the public.

A startled Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette), Hannah’s classmate and friend, finds the box of tapes on his doorstep. Completely unaware of what he could have done to hurt her, he listens to each tape as instructed, and in the process learns of the harsh realities she had to endure.

The good

13 Reasons Why has some genuine goods in the bag. It’s fueled by excellent acting, thanks to a talented cast led by Katherine Langford and Dylan Minnette. It also features a laudable amount of diversity in its characters, successfully defying high school stereotypes and breaking social constructs. It makes clear its efforts to bring minorities into the limelight, a big leap forward towards inspiring acceptance in a world thriving on discrimination and racism.



The first episode is excellently executed and thoroughly succeeds in fulfilling its purpose: to draw viewers in. The theme and characters of the series are presented with artistry and skill, and towards the end of the episode I’m left invested and wanting more. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there.

The bad

Each episode focuses on a specific character and what s/he has done to agonize Hannah Baker, and although this setup might seem natural, the show just doesn’t have enough material to sustain it. A lot of times the episodes just feel too stretched, with a lot of unnecessary scenes stuffed in just to reach the one hour mark.

Clay’s character reinforces this by listening to the tapes at an incredibly slow pace, at times taking a whole day on a single tape and at others waiting hours or days in between tapes. He repeatedly cites as his reason his emotional incapacity to listen to Hannah’s voice for long periods of time. Add to this that he often bugs his fellow transgressors to just tell him his crime (when he could just, you know, listen to his tape), and his character quickly turns into a flimsy tool used to justify the show’s pacing.

The episodes also build up too much on Clay’s tape. The characters constantly remind him to listen to his own story before placing judgment on them, alluding to a crime much graver than theirs. Upon finally learning of Clay’s little misconduct, though, I honestly just felt cheated, almost as though I was lured by a click bait.

Perhaps the show’s biggest flaw, however, is its portrayal of the character of Hannah Baker herself. Her intentions in creating the tapes, for instance, appear very questionable. In them, she commands each listener to visit all these places in her stories, almost as if she fantasizes about setting off an emotional pilgrimage in her memory. She even encourages her classmates to inflict harm upon each other, as in the case of Tyler, and her tapes could very well have led, or at least contributed, to another high school suicide attempt, that of Alex’s. Even when it had plenty of opportunities to explore Hannah’s struggles with depression, which is certainly what drives her to suicide, the show has instead made her character appear self-centered, vengeful, and dare I say, not really all that different from her perpetrators.

The Verdict

With a talented cast and a markedly diverse set of characters, 13 Reasons Why starts out strong. Its substance, however, is stretched too thinly by its lack of material, and despite its potential to stand out, it resorts to a number of clichés that pull it back down. The show is a missed opportunity to deliver a really relevant film series for present-day teenagers.