ACLARATION: This review may contain spoilers from the first season.Netflix has already made it clear what its favorite audience is when it comes to facing new productions: teens. Two out of three premieres (statistics made to the eye, eh) focus on these stories, and we can’t help but find commonground between them all… beyond its young protagonists. “This Shit Me Beats” (I Am Not Okay with This) is the responsibility of Jonathan Entwistle, Christy Hall and several producers tied to things like “The End of The F***ing World” and “Stranger Things”, two sister series that connect across different edges. The coming-of-age dramedia once again is present in the hand of this adaptation based on the graphic novel of the same name, created by Charles Forsman. The strange structure of this first season brings us seven episodes of twenty minutes (average duration), which shows that “I Am Not Okay with This” was originally conceived as a film and then shone into small parts turned into indiscriminate chapters. This is the only way to explain certain inconsistencies of them, an evil that affects several shows of the most popular streaming system of these times.
Going to the point, Sophia Lillis – the young Beverly Marsh of “It” and the teenage version of Amy Adams in “Sharp Objects” – is Sydney Novak, a 17-year-old girl who lives alongside her mother and little brother Liam, trying to overcome her dad’s suicide a year ago. Frustrated, listless, antisocial…, she barely shares her tribulations with her best friend Dina (Sofia Bryant) and not much else. Therefore, your school consultant advises you to pour all your thoughts, your anger (or whatever you want) into a personal journal, a narrative resource for this first-person story that navigates the difficulties of puberty, the secondary school, the complexities of its family and their sexuality, among other things. So far, a teenage story like so many others, but Sydney’s emotional state begins to alter when Dina steps on as a bride with Bradley Lewis (Richard Ellis), the sportsman and popular kid who treats her as a freak. We can say that her displeasure and antipathy manifests herself almost immediately, implying that the girl possibly has telekinetic powers. One more paranoia for Syd, who seeks some involuntary support (and help) on his flamboyant neighbor and companion Stanley Barber (Wyatt Oleff) – yes, the Stan from “It” – a hipster escaped from a Wes Anderson film, who holds feelings for Novak.
Stan, friend and accomplice of Syd’s greatest secret
“This Shit Beatme” (a local title that says it all, doesn’t it?) mixes the teenage anguish more typical of the nonconformism and grunge atmosphere of the nineties -Someone said “Everything Sucks!” (2018)?- with the superhero genre, as if Syd were a young student of Professor X who is discovering her powers, skills that obviously cannot be controlled and that manifest themselves, just as a result, as a result of all those feelings that she cannot deal with . Metaphors and mutants apart, no doubt, the series has its main appeal in the great performance of Lillis, but not in Novak, a protagonist too unfriendly to connect at first. With the running of episodes, this aversion spreads to the other characters, although Stanley (his sensibility and nerdy) always falls well when we balance. The show doesn’t try to stand out from its minimal special effects or the fantastic plot as an excuse, though it adds up to small crumbs of information chapter by chapter, to build a much larger mystery related to Sydney’s father’s past – with which it seems have more of a common behavior- and a strange character who follows her in the shadows. Nothing creepy for a teenage girl, eh.
The archetypes of the
It is in it (and in the plot of the second season) to discover where these unwanted abilities came from, the share of originality in a story that ends up decanting in various common places and archetypal characters, of those that flood teen dramas and Netflix programs. Despite an agile narrative that catches at times, and the allegory he tries to carry on, “I Am Not Okay With This” lacks that same depth he wants to explore, diverting himself to territories better known and passable to the viewer. Yes, there is anguish and darkness, teenage charm and some discomfort, but it does not possess the extremism of “The End of The F***ing World” or the nostalgic enchantment of Hawkins’s boys.Despite being set today, their timeless “planting” bewildered by being unconvinced by moments, but it is still an easy-to-consume product (that is, seven twenty-minute episodes that are marathoned in the blink of an eye), which knows how to connect with its younger audience and adds the fantastic element to fill in those dramatic moments that don’t always succeeding. Teenage anguish that gets out of hand? That’s already been seen.
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