’90s-set dramedy quickly loses sight of its potential

The new Netflix series “Everything Sucks!” follows the travails of some lowly nerds who belong to the A.V. Club at Boring High School in Oregon. (The real Boring is outside Portland.)

The 10-episode dramedy, available for streaming, is set in the fall of 1996 — which should mean that it holds special appeal to viewers in their waning 30s who know a lot 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 in this direction; America's 1980s fetish remains on conspicuous display in “Stranger Things,” “The Goldbergs,” “The Americans” and so many other shows.

Unfortunately, “Everything Sucks!” is a lesson in what happens when you get the details right (clothes, playlists, slang, hairstyles, props) but squander them on a story that seems decidedly stiff and half-finished.

The result is unfortunate, because the series has a strong cast — particularly its teenagers, whose acting seems like the real thing.

Jahi 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 school principal's shy daughter, Kate (Peyton Kennedy, channeling some of the exquisite nerves that 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). In an adult subplot, the principal, Ken (Patch Darragh), has developed a crush on Luke's mother, Sherry (Claudine Mboligikpelani Nako).

“Everything Sucks!” all but urges its audience to recall the now-legendary ways that Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s 1999 NBC comedy, “Freaks and Geeks” thoughtfully and hilariously captured the ups and downs of high school (and got canceled during its first season).

There's an equidistance here worth noting: When it premiered, “Freaks and Geeks” was looking back 20 years or so to 1980; to the credit of “Everything Sucks!” creators Ben York Jones and Michael Mohan, you can almost feel what they do about the mid-’90s.

But “Everything Sucks!” can only sit by and envy the deft touch with memory, momentum, characters and dialogue that “Freaks and Geeks” exhibited.

After a detentionworthy incident with their enemies in the drama club, Luke and his A.V. crew persuade the thespians to join their effort to make a cheesy sci-fi film on video. As the series progresses, “Everything Sucks!” acts very much like a freshman: Once it gets past its own nervousness and selfconsciousness, 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, 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 expect.

The show feels like another case of Netflix not really knowing what kind of show it wanted — and instead just adding it to the heap.