13 Reasons Why gives no quarter
Second season of teen drama raises new concerns
Warning: This article contains spoilers and details graphic scenes.
A person who committed suicide returning as a ghost. A student arriving at school armed with guns. A rape in a school bathroom.
These are just three reasons why Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why has reignited concerns over its content and what effect it could have on its impressionable teen audience.
Chock-full of new trigger warnings, including a custom video featuring the show ’s leads, the series’ highly anticipated second season debuted Friday, bringing excited fans back to the fictional town of Crestmont and Liberty High School. The newest 13-episode instalment revolves around the aftermath of 17-year-old Hannah Baker’s suicide, the main plot line of season 1.
While prolonged and gory scenes of suicide are absent from season 2, the upgraded trigger warnings aren’t just for show. The new season, much like the first, continues to address sensitive topics including suicide, rape, substance abuse and gun violence. It also features graphic, sometimes disturbing, scenes. However, while the first season was a hit, becoming 2017’s most tweeted about show and currently maintaining an 80 per cent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, the second season hasn’t been as well received. It has a 37 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described by multiple critics as “unnecessary.”
A media watchdog group, the Parents Television Council, is also calling on Netflix to pull both seasons of the series, describing season 2 as “a ticking time bomb to teens and children.”
“If you come into the series with feelings of hopelessness or depression,” wrote PTC program director Melissa Henson, “you’ll never walk away from the series feeling any better. And if you’re not feeling that way, the series will make you feel hopeless and depressed.”
Echoing concerns from season 1 about romanticizing suicide, mental health experts are again worried that showing Hannah’s spirit following one of the main characters, Clay Jensen, could present the false idea that after committing suicide, teens would be able to see how their friends and family react, NBC reported.
Another subject the show’s second season tackles is gun violence in schools, an issue that has been at the forefront of people’s minds since the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., and more recently at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas.
In the final minutes of the season’s finale, one of the main characters, a bullied teen named Tyler Downs, arrives at a school dance armed with guns, including one that appears to be an assault rifle. Instead of calling police, the other characters, all students, confront Tyler themselves, talking him into lowering his gun.
This isn’t the right message to be sending to students faced with a shooter, Phyllis Alongi, clinical director of the Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide, told NBC.
“When someone has a gun, you don’t stay with the person and try to take gun away from them,” said Alongi. “You call the authorities.”
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, show creator Brian Yorkey said he was interested in “trying to understand what goes into the experience of a young man who goes that route.”
“We’re much more interested in understanding that character’s journey than we are in seeing it end in the worst way possible,” Yorkey said.
The thwarted school shooting isn’t the only part of the season’s 13th episode people took issue with. One scene — which depicts Tyler being savagely attacked and sodomized by members of the school’s baseball team in a bathroom — left both mental health experts and fans concerned that the show has taken things too far.