That’s… surprisingly heavy.
Oh, man, we’re just getting started. Clay is sent a package in the post containing a collection of cassette tapes.
I thought you said this was the present day?
It is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, the tapes are essentially Hannah’s suicide note. On each side (there are thirteen sides, hence thirteen reasons), she addresses one person from her school, who she says did something to contribute to her decision to end her life, and tells the story of what they did, which ranges from bullying, sexism and rumor-spreading to, well, spoilers, but stuff that’s much worse. She tells the recipients to listen to each of the tapes before passing them on to the next person.
Ok. So this is sort of “Pretty Little Liars” territory.
Hmm, not really. There’s a certain Judy Blume/After School Special vibe, but the tone is closer to that wave of New Sincerity teen movies that landed in recent years — “The Spectacular Now,’ “The Perks Of Being A Wallflower,” “The Fault In Our Stars” to some extent. Heart on sleeve, emotional, and tackling some serious issues.
Not a lot of laughs, then?
Not a LOT, but this isn’t entirely dour territory: there’s a pleasing wit to the scripting, at least in happier times, that’s reminiscent of the Whedons or Sherman-Palladinos of the world. But it is mostly dour territory, and that’s probably correct, given the subject matter and all — the show is, as far as we got this weekend (about half way), pretty responsible about the things it’s dealing with, while also not tying itself in knots about them to the extent that it cripples the drama.
Any other familiar faces involved?
Among the kids, not really, though you might recognize Devin Druid, who plays Tyler, from “Louie” or Joachim Trier’s “Louder Than Bombs,” and Sosie Bacon, who plays the character of Skye, is the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. You’ll spot a few more recognizable faces among the adults: Derek Luke plays the school guidance counsellor, Steven Weber the Principal, “Spotlight” actor Brian D’Arcy James plays Hannah’s grieving father, and Kate Walsh brings across some of those “Perks Of Being A Wallflower” vibes as her mother.
And McCarthy directs the whole thing?
No, no, no, just the first two. The line-up of directors is pretty solid: TV vets Helen Shaver and Jessica Yu, plus the great Carl Franklin, “Stanford Prison Experiment” helmer Kyle Patrick Alvarez, and, most surprisingly but pleasingly, New Queer Cinema legend Gregg Araki (last seen on TV doing some second season “Red Oaks” episodes).
Fine, but there’s been plenty of bad TV made by great directors — just look at “Vinyl.” Is it any good?
Ehhhh, kind of?
That’s a resounding endorsement.
I wish I could say I liked it more. There’s definitely stuff to like about it, starting with that tone. There’s a sort of low-key authenticity and honesty to its depiction of teen life, giving a thriller-like pull without making it into overblown melodrama or hacky thriller (more “Big Little Lies” than “Pretty Little Liars”), and the characters are all pleasingly complicated and flawed, even if you sometimes feel that they could have played by a selection of people who fit outside the descriptor of “blandly attractive.” Langford and Minnette are particularly good: she’s unafraid to make her tragic heroine unsympathetic in places, while Minnette finds some interesting and surprising textures in a character that could so easily have come across as a cypher. It feels in some ways like a successor to “My So-Called Life,” a stated influence on the book.
Well, that’s good!
Yeah, but the better parts of the show are sort of buried under its high-concept conceit. You can see the idea: the accumulation of injustices, abuses and betrayals that on their own might not break you, but together could cause someone to want to take their own life. But there’s a bit of a sense of contrivance to the idea, and true to the form of most Netflix series dramas, simply not enough story to go around. When the first episode sees Clay taking three attempts just to listen to the first tape (admittedly true to a millennial who only vaguely knows what a cassette is, but also plot blocking of the worst kind), you know you’re not going to be zipping through the story, and even within two or three episodes, you start to feel the drag. There might have been a great movie to be made called “8 Reasons Why,” but we’re at an hour per reason here —
Wait, this is thirteen hours long?
Yep.
That’s longer than “OJ: Made In America.”
Five hours longer. It’s simply too much space and time for a relatively intimate story, and the parceling out of the mystery with the one-character-per-episode feels more and more cheap as it goes on. Maybe it pulls together in the second half (let us know if you’ve finished and you think otherwise), but this very much feels like another Netflix drama that’s dragged down by its pace.
So one to skip?
Depends on you, really. I don’t feel particularly compelled to finish it, but if you’ve had a real void in your life for a sober, well-acted, true-to-life teen drama, it might hit your sweet spot. I’m probably not the target audience, but even so, despite its better qualities (shout out in particular to the synthy score by Eskmo, who is also doing excellent work on “Billions”) it burned through my patience pretty quickly.
Grade?
Somewhere between a B- and a C+.