Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
Luke’s town is Boring.
No, it really is. Boring, Oregon, to be exact—the sort of place where tourists only visit to take pictures of the welcome sign.
“You notice they don’t actually ever go into town?” Luke asks his friend, Kate. She does, and they slowly walk back into their Boring community, where they attend Boring high school in 1996 and do the sort of Boring mid-’90s things that Boring citizens do.
But in truth, high school isn’t boring in Boring. Not for Luke, anyway—or, at least, not just yet. He and his best chums, Tyler and McQuaid, are high school freshmen now, freshmen so fresh that they still have their new-student smell. It’s a challenge for most new students to navigate high school’s complex pecking order and find their place in the world. On top of that, Luke’s also feeling the first stirrings of young love—and an undeniable attraction to sophomore Kate Messner.
But his would-be relationship suffers from a few little hiccups. One, Kate’s the daughter of Boring’s goofy, if well-meaning, high school principal, a widower who’s suffering a bit himself in the love department. And, two, Kate has eyes for someone else: Emaline, the high school drama queen.
Yeah, things got complicated in Boring real quick.
Back in 1996, television was a simpler place. The History Channel showed history shows, The Learning Channel aired educational programming and Netflix was still a year removed from sending its subscribers DVDs through the mail. These days, the History Channel is mainly Ancient Alien repeats, TLC is wall-to-wall reality shows, and the megalithic streaming force that is Netflix has built an empire on nostalgia.
Consider Netflix’s Fuller House, Arrested Development and Gilmore Girls, all reboots of one-time broadcast shows. Then there’s the appeal of The Crown, which whisks viewers back into the glamorous and sometimes decadent 1960s and ’70s, or Stranger Things, which built its brand not just on creepy monsters, but a love of all things ’80s. Even its controversial series 13 Reasons Why, which took place more or less in the present day, insisted its main characters listened to, of all things, cassette tapes.
So it was only a matter of time before the 1990s joined the Netflix original programming party, and Everything Sucks! explicitly, perhaps embarrassingly, plays to viewers’ presumed affections for Oasis and Surge soda.
Which forces me, a child of the ’80s, to ask … was the ’90s simply a shallower age?
Listen, The Crown and Stranger Things both have plenty of weaknesses, as we’ve chronicled here. But both seem to truly understand the eras in which they take place. They so seamlessly slip into their respective times that, paradoxically, they scarcely pay attention to them. Everything Sucks!, meanwhile, constantly and self-consciously reminds us of the time period. “Hey, look at that!” it seems to shout. “Someone’s doing an Ace Ventura impersonation! Ha!”
If only the show’s main failing was its tone-deaf sense of nostalgia. Alas, we’re just beginning.
Obviously, the theme of same-sex attraction resides at the core of this show, and Everything Sucks! presents the mid-1990s as a time of pervasive homophobia. Hateful, bigoted slurs are scrawled on lockers and hurled in conversation. The show clearly wants us to embrace Kate as she questions her sexuality, and anyone who questions whether those same-sex leanings are part of God’s plan can just lump it, the show implies.
Other romantic and sexual dalliances fluff out much of the show’s subplots, from Kate’s father’s own search for a significant other to high school bragging and banter. And it’s not just talk, either: Netflix allows for explicit nudity to be shown. In the opening Kate pilfers a pornographic magazine, looks at the exposed bare breasts therein (which we get an eyeful of, as well), then, it’s suggested, masturbates.
A reminder: Kate’s a sophomore in high school. And to me, she looks even younger. Everything Sucks! introduces us to characters who are just beginning to understand what sexuality is … and the show then follows them into their bedrooms as they explore that aspect of their identity further.
The show’s preoccupation with sex is problematic in and of itself. But when I consider how young its main players are, I wonder: Is Netflix aiming this show at equally young viewers? Hard to tell. Sure, its preoccupation with ’90s-era nostalgia suggests an older demographic. Then again, the show feels like it’s aiming for a gentle, coming-of-age dramedy vibe—you know, except for all the porn mags and stuff—and Netflix has mystifyingly rated Everything Sucks! as TV-14. Back in 1996, porn mags would be kept covered behind the convenience-store counter. Now, you can apparently access ’em with just a remote control and a promise to your parents that your homework’s all done.
Language can be pretty rough, too, and we also hear some conversations about suicide.
It’s all too bad, because underneath its sexual preoccupations and its obsession with ’90s pop, Everything Sucks! does have some interesting things to say about growing up. And it takes the time to treat the kids’ parents as real people (with real problems), too, something that often gets short shrift in teen-focused series. There’s a good show underneath the skin of this bad show. But in this case, the skin just goes too deep to get at it.
It’s the first day of high school for friends Luke, Tyler and McQuaid. The three social misfits are determined to fit in. Naturally, their first stop is the AV Club, where Luke spots Kate working a camera for the high school’s news show. He begins plotting how to get closer to her, and perhaps even to ask her out. Kate, meanwhile, is beginning to wonder whether she likes boys at all.
She snags a porn mag from Luke’s garage and leafs through its pages, landing on a spread of a bare-breasted woman (visible both to her and the viewer). The camera zooms in on her face as masturbates. Her father walks in on her: “You know, Kate, it’s OK if you want to look at this magazine,” he says, acknowledging he’s looked at pornography himself, “but you don’t have to look like the women in these magazines.” He then begins to talk awkwardly about “breasts and bottoms and pubis areas.”
Luke and his friends discuss how likely it is that each will have sex before they’re done with high school. Kate talks to Luke about Tori Amos, speculating that her album “little earthquakes” is about orgasms. Kate’s dad, the school principal, apparently had a fling with another school employee over the summer; he tells her that their relationship can legally continue, “Provided we don’t copulate on school grounds, of course.” Two high school students perform a Shakespeare skit in the cafeteria (one is “stabbed” via butter knife, while another mimics slitting her own throat with a corn dog), and the two kiss passionately afterwards. Kate ogles the female actress.
There’s a reference during a high school news show to President Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act, in which marriage is legally defined as one man and one woman. (One of the young anchors jokes that it’s disappointing, because he wanted to marry a Taco Bell enchirito.) We learn the school mascot is a “beaver” (likely intended by the show to be a crude double entendre), and someone makes a sexually charged quip about corn dogs.
We learn that Luke’s dad apparently ran out on him and his mom. His mother, being an airline attendant, leaves Luke at home alone for several days at a time, and Luke says one of the perks is access to lots of R-rated movies. Characters say the f-word once and the s-word twice, along with “a–,” “b–ch” and “d–n.”
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
