In which former teenage social outcasts Kylie Klein-Nixon and Emily Brookes debut their new, snappier, single-topic (with lots of tangents) podding style with a discussion of Netflix’s new dramedy about teenage social outcasts, I Am Not Okay With This.
If you took all of our favourite teen-focused films and TV shows – your Buffys, your Freaks and Geeks, Stranger Things, the entire John Hughes canon, what have you – and put them in a venn diagram, the point where they converge would be the Netflix series I Am Not Okay With This, a seven-parter (Emily thinks that’s too short) about a 17-year-old girl dealing with high school, her annoying next-door neighbour, her father’s suicide and, oh, the fact that she has incredibly destructive and largely uncontrollable superpowers.
Telekinesis as a metaphor for the trials of puberty and emergent sexuality are nothing new, but with a top-notch cast (including teenagers played by, shock horror, actual teenagers), a snappy, snarky script and pop culture references that are plentiful and prominent, this is a hard one not to like.
But it saves a lot of big revelations (as well as a Roxy Music prom dance and a lengthy Carrie homage) for the final episode, which ends on the sharpest of cliffhangers. The graphic novel on which it’s based and which Kylie has read is a standalone, so where does the show go from here?
Tune find out what we think about this, why 16 Candles is the worst John Hughes movie, how far and for what reasons we stuck with The Handmaid’s Tale, our views on The CW’s teen soaps, and which friend Emily is going to have to abandon for alerting her to that Timothee Chalamet photo.
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I Am Not Okay With This is streaming in its entirety on Netflix now. Here’s the trailer.
Is this enough to redeem 16 Candles? You decide.
This song was probably not played at your school ball, but how much do you wish it was?
Here’s the best song in the show… the one we forgot to talk about…
the girl in row k 