“I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS,” NETFLIX
Sydney (Sophia Lillis), a teenager in a dispirited small town, just wants to be normal. But her father killed himself in the basement a year ago, she can’t seem to talk with her mother without fighting, and her best friend brings up unexpected feelings. When it all becomes too much for her, she explodes with anger, as a teenager is wont to do. The thing is, though: She really explodes, causing mass destruction in her wake. Based on the graphic novel by Charles Forsman, the show was adapted by co-creators Jonathan Entwistle (who previously adapted Forsman’s “The End of the ... World”) and Christy Hall.
The reviews:
“What feels so excitingly fresh about ‘I Am Not Okay With This’ is that it actually takes time to explore the rage of adolescent girls,” Salon’s Ashlie D. Stevens notes. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan singles out Lillis’ performance, “which manages to convey the depths and numbness of loss beneath the layers of more ordinary teenage fury and frustration all lying beneath the traditional pose of sardonic disaffection. You want to smack her, champion her, comfort her and be her all at the same time.”
The scoop:
This series has style to spare. Make that styles. “Growing up in the U.K., we very much have this kind of fetishization of American high school movies and TV shows,” notes Entwistle — particularly those of the ’80s and ’90s. All of it goes into this mix. So an episode that seems to pay homage to “The Breakfast Club” actually takes its cues from “Dawson’s Creek’s” tribute to the movie. It’s a deliberate pastiche of a pastiche within a meta-mash-up. Add the small-town superpower element, “and I felt like, here’s an opportunity to genre-bend and make something that feels of no era in particular.”