Everything Sucks! Isn’t Sublime, but It’s Got Verve
Everything Sucks! is a mess. But, then again, so is high school. And part of this new Netflix show’s..
Everything Sucks! is a mess. But, then again, so is high school. And part of this new Netflix show’s charm is the way it somehow, rather scrappily, finds something winning in all its clutter. It’s easy to forgive the many wild flails this 10-episode first season makes, veering from clichéd high-school comedy to incisive portraits of coming out and dating as a single parent—or at least, it becomes easy over time.
The first episode of the show—created by Ben York Jones and Michael Mohan—is really bad, a dull rehash of done-to-death high-school tropes gussied up with a 1990s gloss. Yes, this is a nostalgia show, a nineties nostalgia show, like a BuzzFeed listicle come to life. Except Everything Sucks! is casual—or is it lazy?—about its 90s-ness, relying on music (the Verve Pipe, the Cardigans, Alanis Morissette, etc.) to telegraph its setting and never really grappling with any of the politics or idiom of the day. It’s a period show whose periodness is mostly just a flimsy gimmick. The first shots of the pilot lay it on thick—snap bracelets, troll dolls, a Mighty Mighty Bosstones song blaring—but then the show kinda forgets when it is.
Which is perfectly fine by me, probably because I was a teenager myself in 1996 and am not all that thrilled to be old enough that my adolescence has become the purview of nostalgia culture. Anyway: Everything Sucks! shines in more important aspects, particularly its surprising soft-spokenness. Once you get past the pilot, the show reveals something very . . . Canadian about itself, despite being set in Oregon. (Don’t worry; the Ramona Quimby books remain unchallenged as the best fiction about young people in Oregon.) What I mean is there are twinges of Degrassi at work in the show’s humble ramble: it’s quaint and amiable, and almost everyone is regular good-looking instead of Hollywood good-looking. It’s all pleasant and a little annoying, the way Degrassi so often is.
Comparing something to Degrassi is largely high praise, mind you. Everything Sucks! is, quite unlike that dumb and ungainly title, a refreshingly good-hearted, uncynical show about adolescence. It primarily focuses on a clash between A.V. club nerds—including series lead Jahi Winston—and drama club dorks, only the clash is quickly transformed into a collaboration, all the kids working together to make a goofy sci-fi movie. How cute! (And, again, a little annoying.) Where the real tension comes in is between Luke (Winston) and Kate (Peyton Kennedy), as Luke goes to aggressive lengths to win Kate’s affections while Kate questions her sexuality.
There’s more than a tinge of the problematic in the way the show frames Luke’s pursuit of Kate. He does one thing in particular that is supposed to be an endearing grand gesture, but instead plays like a boy publicly railroading a girl into dating him. If the show left that uninterrogated, I’d be much less charmed by the whole thing. But somewhere about halfway through the season, the show does begin addressing the way nerd-tries-for-a-girl narratives so rarely consider the girl’s perspective and agency. I’m not saying the show is shifting paradigms or anything, but it is admirably self-aware and nuanced enough to question and grapple with some of the basic premises that guide it and so many other high-school stories.
This is also a show with a black boy and a queer girl as the leads, with the white, straight kids playing sidekick for once. And it’s a show featuring an interracial relationship that’s sweet and casually stated. That feels different! The relationship is, quite conveniently but not cloyingly so, between Luke’s mom, Sherry (Claudine Nako), and Kate’s school-principal dad (Patch Darragh). Their courtship and the mild troubles it creates are given a surprising amount of attention, considering this is ostensibly a show about teens. But Nako and Darragh are such good company that you hardly miss the kids. Actually, I didn’t miss them at all.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t care about them! I did, mostly. And the young cast is strong. Winston is a striking little actor, sprightly and committed and wise beyond his years in a way that’s just shy of precocious. Kennedy is good in fits and starts, though a bit flat at times, as are Rio Mangini and Quinn Liebling (who seems like a kid they just found in the high school where they shot the show) as Luke’s geeky friends. The gang feels a little bit like a generic knock-off of the Stranger Things gang, but they’re likable enough. Older theater kids played by Sydney Sweeney and Elijah Stevenson are less engaging, mostly because I just didn’t buy their characters. That’s not what theater kids are like! At least, not all the ones I knew when, y’know, I was a theater kid.
Everything Sucks! makes other missteps in the credibility department, but it maintains an emotional sincerity that more than held my interest. One episode in particular is a stunner, its climax scored to that great 1990s plaint “Silent All These Years.” It plays to genuinely beautiful effect, illustrating a dawning sense of self both with subtlety and in a big, tingling swell. It’s a transcendent moment on a show which is otherwise mostly successful in its simplicity. I guess some nostalgia works on me after all—as long as it involves Tori Amos, anyway.
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