Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
Maya Stern loved her husband. But then he was murdered.
And now she’s sitting right in the middle of the grief and unfurling.
She’s a grieving widow and a single mother to her young daughter Lily. She’s also an ex-Army Captain with a controversial-yet-impressive resume. But that detail doesn’t quite matter now that her husband, Joe, is gone.
Unless it does.
One day, Maya checks the nanny cam given to her by her best friend and she sees her husband sitting in the same room as her daughter. When she confronts her nanny, Izabella, about it, Izabella pelts her with pepper spray, steals her SD card and disappears.
When she tells her wealthy, influential mother-in-law what happened, and what she saw, she’s accused of hallucinating, of not confronting her scandalous, violent, military career and of being an unfit mother.
When she tells the detectives on her husband’s case about it, they try not to automatically assume she needs to be put away. And at first blush, that would seem a reasonable assumption … until they make a connection.
It seems Maya’s beloved sister, who was murdered years prior, was killed with the exact type of bullets and gun that murdered her husband, Joe.
That’s not a coincidence.
Something nasty is afoot. And Maya is going to risk her life to find out what’s going on, and to uncover why some of those who are closest to her are trying to silence her.
Whodunit mysteries are nothing new to television. Nor are books written by Harlan Coben and then translated into a television series. Just like the Netflix show titled Fool Me Once.
This TV-MA series is packed with murder, occasionally graphic violence and enough mystery to keep viewers coming back through this eight-episode first season. That’s not all though. It’s also full of some harsh, surprising profanity, a bit of nudity, crass comments and drinking.
The bulk of this series focuses on a grieving widow and her harried militarized past, but it also delves deeper into family ties, lies and secrets that have been hidden for years.
Yes, the main actress here can be compelling and the storyline wants to (and often can) hook its audience, but the lines can be a bit stale and the content problems far outnumber the suspects.
Ex-soldier Maya Stern grieves her husband’s death, but she soon uncovers secret details that make her question whether he was murdered at all.
Maya watches her husband be shot and killed, and the murder is replayed on the screen multiple times. Maya also has flashbacks of her sister’s bloody murder and is later told by agents that the same gun that killed her sister was directly tied to that which killed her husband.
Maya struggles emotionally as she wrestles with flashbacks from war (we briefly see bloodied men and hear screams). Maya confronts her nanny, aggressively, about an incident and the woman sprays Mace in her eyes, steals an SD card and flees.
A college hazing incident opens and closes the episode. It’s clear that the hazing is brutal, played out by masked men, and includes alcohol, tying a young man to a chair and torturing him. We only see his body shaking before the camera pans away. A man blacks out and accidentally crashes his car.
The f-word is used nine times. The c-word is used once and other profanity includes words like “h—,” “s—hole,” “b–tard,” “d–k” and several British profanities or vulgarities.
Maya and her husband kiss at their wedding. Maya pulls down a coach’s shorts as he verbally abuses his team of young, female soccer players, and we see his bare buttocks.
Maya takes a pill for her post-traumatic stress disorder. Men and women alike drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).
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.
