13 Reasons Why

Netflix's adaptation of Jay Asher's YA novel, developed by Brian Yorkey and executive produced by Selena Gomez, dropped in 2017 and ran for four seasons. Katherine Langford plays Hannah Baker, a high schooler who has died by suicide before the show begins. Dylan Minnette is Clay Jensen, the quiet classmate who finds a box of cassette tapes she recorded, each one naming a person she blames. The first-act hook is simple. Clay presses play. Someone he knew is speaking from beyond, and she's built a case.

For about six episodes, the mystery-box structure holds. Langford is genuinely good, and she has to carry the show from the grave, which is a nasty assignment. Minnette does a lot with a role that's mostly listening and flinching. The supporting bench has real actors in it — Alisha Boe, Christian Navarro, Brandon Flynn — and when the scripts stay inside a single conversation, the young cast can find the truth of it. The pilot, directed by Tom McCarthy fresh off Spotlight, is well-shot and moody in a way the rest of the show never matches again. When it operates as a grief drama between two parents played by Kate Walsh and Brian d'Arcy James, it's briefly a different, better show.

Almost everything else. The tape gimmick is designed for one book, and stretching it to 13 hours means every character is either a monster or a puddle, with the plot pausing whenever a new grievance needs airing. The dialogue is written to be quoted on Tumblr, not spoken by teenagers. Yorkey's staff makes the same choice again and again: pick the most graphic, most on-the-nose depiction of a hard subject, then linger. Clinicians and suicide-prevention groups begged the producers to reconsider specific choices before release. The show went ahead anyway, then quietly re-edited a scene two years later after the research came in. That's the whole problem in miniature. And then it kept going for three more seasons the story could not support.

If you loved Pretty Little Liars for the melodrama and can treat this as a darker cousin, you'll get through the first season. If you liked Euphoria's formal risk-taking, you'll find this flat and literal-minded by comparison. Anyone tuning in for a serious look at adolescent mental health should watch Skins UK or It's Kind of a Funny Story instead. Viewers with any personal proximity to the subject matter should just not.

WAR CRIME isn't about the topics. Plenty of great television sits with grief, assault, and self-harm. It's about how this show treats them: as engines for a revenge thriller aimed at teenagers, dressed in the language of a PSA it wasn't willing to actually be. The writing hectors when it should dramatize. Every theme arrives by voiceover, every lesson gets a monologue, every craft decision reaches for shock where a subtler show would reach for character. That's the Lecture Test failing in both directions at once, sermon and spectacle in the same scene. Experts warned the producers. The producers waved them off, then edited later. Sentenced accordingly.