Everything Sucks! a self-fulfilling prophecy
It’s nice to see ’90s instead of ’80s, but Netflix show is as clunky as dial-up
Everything Sucks! Now streaming, Netflix
A new Netflix dramedy called Everything Sucks!, follows the travails of some lowly nerds who belong to the AV club at Boring High School, in a little Oregon town called Boring (there really is such a place, outside Portland).
It’s set in the fall of 1996, which should mean that it holds special appeal to viewers who are in their waning 30s and can tell you all about alternative rock, Spice Girls and the adolescent angst of the dial-up years. Pop culture and television are overdue in shifting their nostalgic gaze; America’s ’80s fetish remains on conspicuous display in Stranger Things, The Goldbergs,
The Americans and so much else.
Unfortunately, Everything Sucks! is a lesson in what happens when you get the details right (the clothes, the playlists, the slang, the hairstyles, the props), but then squander them on a story that feels decidedly stiff and half-finished.
Too bad, because the show does have a strong cast — particularly its teenagers, who have the benefit of acting and seeming like the real thing. Jahi Di’Allo Winston stars as Luke O’Neil, the leader of a geek triumvirate that includes his friends McQuaid (Rio Mangini) and Tyler (Quinn Liebling, the show’s standout).
On the first day of school, Luke develops a crush on the principal’s shy daughter, Kate (Peyton Kennedy, channelling some of the exquisite nerves a teenage Claire Danes perfected in My So-Called Life), who is privately questioning her sexual orientation while suffering the capricious torment of a mean girl (Sydney Sweeney).
Everything Sucks! acts like a freshman: Once it gets past its own self-consciousness, it opens up a little and relaxes. It never completely chills out, nor is it ever truly funny.
The real problem is that the show is trying too hard to serve, at minimum, two audiences: The teenagers who will watch anything and everything on Netflix; and adults who might be lured into the potential nostalgia trip. Neither group, I suspect, will get what they came for. Much of what transpires hews childishly to Disney Channel tropes and outcomes. At the same time, Everything Sucks! uses language and reaches for decidedly mature situations.
It feels like another case of Netflix not really knowing (or seeming to care), what kind of show it was developing here, and instead just adding it to the heap.