No reason to keep watching ‘13 Reasons’
We don’t need 13 more reasons. The second season of Netflix’s
13 Reasons Why (streaming Friday, ★☆☆☆) is a tawdry, unnecessary exercise, a blatant grab for the headlines the teen suicide drama garnered last year when it premiered.
How do you follow up on something that was as much of a lightning rod as
13 Reasons Season 1? The series was criticized for its graphic depiction of suicide and sexual assaults, for potentially misinforming teens about mental health and suicide, and for sensationalizing its serious subject matter. Netflix responded by adding content warnings to the first season, and those warnings continue in Season 2. But the tendency to use an issue as serious as sexual assault just for drama’s sake has continued. In the 13 Reasons world, it’s all just another plot device.
It’s not just the serious subject matter that didn’t need to be revisited, but the plot itself. Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) left behind cassette tapes detailing 13 reasons why she killed herself. The tapes are done. The story should be, too.
And yet, here we are.
Set five months after Hannah’s death, the new season follows the civil trial as her parents sue the school district for its part in her death. Instead of focusing on one “reason” per interminable hour-long episode, each episode this season revolves around testimony from one of Hannah’s classmates. It is, quite literally, a rehash of all the events we saw in Season 1.
The show manages to shoehorn in the ghost of Hannah as Clay’s (Dylan Minnette) talking hallucination and through further unilluminating flashbacks to the time before she died. The writers also try to raise the melodrama, spinning tiresome conspiracies and mysteries at the school and putting the traumatized teens through more harassment and abuse than they were subjected to in Season 1. A rape victim finds a sex doll strung up on her front porch, duct tape over its mouth and “slut” written on its chest. And that’s only in the first two episodes.
The new season tries to make a point about rape culture, slut shaming and sexual harassment, but its depiction of these complex topics has all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. If it’s meant to start a conversation, as the creators insist, it certainly isn’t going to be a very nuanced one.
It was difficult to get through all 13 episodes of the first season, and the new episodes are even harder to watch. The pace drags, the dialogue is unnatural and cheesy, the plot is dull and absurd, and most of the characters are still abhorrent. Watching is a chore, but there’s no benefit at the end.
There are zero reasons to put yourself through it.