Well, you all know how much I love gushing about all the good shows I watch, but anyone who knows me well knows that the bad stuff entices me just as much. With my new schedule, I’d like to keep things varied on the quality scale, and on the negative spectrum, what better experiment with this than “13 Reasons Why”?
This is a series that’s been on my radar for a while, and not for the best reasons. The show covers topics like suicide, and from what pretty much everybody I know who’s seen it says, it fails horribly at handling the subject. I want to see exactly how true that is, but I’ll be trying to keep an open mind here. But one thing I can say at the start of all this is that, when it comes to topics like that, you need to be very, VERY careful with it. If you fail, it can come across as incompetent at best and dangerous at worst.
With that said, let’s get into this. “13 Reasons Why” is Netflix’s adaptation of the Jay Asher book of the same name. Before any of you go nuts at me, no, I’ve never read it. It’s possible that some of the show’s bad qualities can be attributed to something getting lost in translation, but I have no idea. But this is an adaptation meant to reach a wider audience, so any decisions you make should work regardless of whether it was in the book or not. From what I hear about this show, I’m screwed, but let’s look at the first episode: ‘Tape 1, Side A’.
The main concept of the series involves a high school student named Hannah Baker committing suicide, and her classmates are dealing with the ramifications of this. The school as a whole has the subject on the brain and is encouraging everyone to talk to someone if they need help, whereas the various students are trying to deal with it in their own ways.
The main character is Clay, who’s one of the students lamenting the loss of Hannah. But soon enough, a box arrives at his house with a bunch of cassette tapes inside, and as he plays them, he discovers that they’re recordings by Hannah, talking about her life leading up to her suicide and everyone who she blames for it, the 13 Reasons Why, as it were.
As a premise, I will admit it’s not that bad. A suicide victim getting a posthumous opportunity to give their side of the story is at least an interesting one. But what matters is how it executes it, and as far as this first episode goes…hoo boy.
So, as Clay listens in on the first side of the first tape, the episode often flashes back to the moments in Hannah’s life that she’s describing, depicting a boy named Justin Foley as the first reason for her suicide. One thing to note from these flashbacks is that Hannah…isn’t exactly a likable person. She constantly berates others(even her supposed friends), pulls mean-spirited pranks on the boy she likes, and cites him as a reason for her suicide(which I’ll get to soon). If they wanted to have a morally gray kind of character in this role, I’m not totally against that, but the episode just treats her berating and pranks like a quirk she has. It’s a weird tonal dissonance that makes the majority of these flashbacks more confused than anything else.
So why does Hannah cite Justin as one of the 13 reasons? Because during their date, he took pictures of her going down the slide(one of which involved a panty shot) and one of his dumbass friends decided to post it on social media, making her a bit of a talking point at the school. From what we see of their date, Hannah didn’t have any problem with the picture-taking, that’s the first thing to note. The second is that Justin wasn’t the one to post it; his friend Bryce was. Sure, he did show it to a few of his friends, but I think it’s odd that Hannah would be citing him specifically in this instance. The fault really is mainly on Bryce here, so that whole sequence comes off as just morally confused.
If you’re wondering what Clay is doing during all this, well, not very much. He mainly goes from place to place as Hannah instructs him on the recording, and the flashbacks just sort of happen when he arrives. He can’t have been there during a lot of these, and it’s highly likely that the recording is laying the info out for him, but it doesn’t leave Clay with a lot to do here.
What is important about his stuff, however, is the fact that someone is keeping an eye on him during all this and making sure he’s following the tape’s instructions. For the majority of the episode, we don’t know who it is, but the end pretty much makes it clear that it was his friend Tony following him. Tony lets him know that he himself isn’t on the tapes, but he does heavily suggest that Clay is on there somewhere. I assume that’ll be for the next episode, but for now, I gotta wonder what exactly Clay did that caused Tony to act this way towards him.
Yeah, this is a pretty bad start. I’ll give it credit that there is the occasional bit of editing I can say is impressive, but that’s really the only positive I can give so far. My fingers are crossed that it’ll get better from here, but I’m not holding my breath, if that makes sense.
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