13 Reasons Why is the best thing on Netflix right now
We dare you not to get emotionally hooked on Netflix’s latest must-see binge watch.
It’s hard to imagine a TV show I’ve got more out of in recent years. You would think the best time to review a TV show is on the completion of the series. When it’s run its course, and objectivity can be applied. When coolness of thought settles into your opinions. When you think, well maybe it wasn’t as strong as it felt at the time of watching. Not this. Not 13 Reasons Why.
Time distorts opinions, particularly your own. Unless something dominated your thinking and still does in the way something like The Sopranos can; to the point where it becomes embedded in your own personal culture. In how you reference things in everyday conversation, in how you benchmark TV, in how you feel when someone mentions a character’s name, or a scene. You’re pining to be back, watching Carmela Soprano talk about Andrea Bocelli over lunch with friends or the awkwardness of Christopher Moltisanti trying to make it as a screen writer.
But such renown is built over time. When something new comes along you don’t know quite what you are getting. I still don’t fully, as I’m at the midway point of its 13 episodes. But I’m in love. And love can loosen its grasp over time. We become dismissive of Dawson’s Creek 15 years after we last loved it. The memories have fused and characters have faded. But at the time of watching, we weren’t so cynical.
If you are watching 13 Reasons Why you will move on from it quickly. In the sense that we are awash with new, robust, character-driven dramas. But the options can be overwhelming. You can spend unnecessary time organising your Netflix programme list, knowing deep-down that ultimately you will be lucky to watch 20 percent of what you have laid out for yourself.
It’s a little like Twitter users clogging up their likes feed, with articles they dream of reading when an evening opens up. But before long it becomes overwhelming and the hunger for knowledge has its appetite compromised by an intimidating, insurmountable abundance of material. It really was easier when we had to go in search of our music, books, newspapers and magazines. Our TV is now at the same point. More options and less time.
If the binge watch pace has changed too, so has our involvement. With storylines and characters. A week long anticipation of a new episode has been replaced by a full immersion. But that’s nothing new. But the ease of access is a little more relative. Both options are available. Designated Survivor is weekly on Netflix. So your patience must match the composed, measured, clipped tones of Kiefer Sutherland’s President Kirkman.
It’s hard to imagine how 13 Reasons Why could be watched any other way. Not that it can’t, I’m sure. But it’s all encompassing at the moment. It has the balance of wanting to find out things and wanting to savour. Savour connections you feel with characters and genuine feeling for stark situations.
There is a structured, dramatic narrative at work here. Adapted from Jay Asher’s 2007 young adult novel, it follows Clay Jensen [Dylan Minnette] who is left with the grim task of listening to a cassette-based oral history of the events that led up the death of Hannah Baker [Katherine Langford], a friend, romantic-interest and a young woman struggling with high-school acceptance. Hannah narrates the tapes.
The theme may not sound original, but the concept certainly is. A nostalgic journey led by the archaic modem of a Walkman, it is a different approach. And it is while you adjust to the approach, that you realise there is real depth to this programme. Not just through the characters — the screen-presence of Tony Padilla [Christian Navarro] is hypnotic. Even peripheral characters are infused with understated charisma; like school counsellor Mr Porter [Derek Luke].
Hannah Baker’s life is portrayed with genuine depth by Langford. The simplicity of the want to fit in and have friends, undermined by the self-serving actions of others. Manipulated and a figure of derision, the path which leads to her suicide is clearly laid out. And it’s harrowing. Loneliness, harassment, betrayal and narcissism in varying guises all have a role to play.
And Clay Jensen is so immersed in it; in the tapes, in his friend’s pain, that at the juncture I’m at, his mental tenacity has been tested to the point of signs of fragility showing and being openly exposed.
It’s at this point that the patient build up is really bearing its teeth. That not everything is clear and, maybe Clay is not the pillar of morality the programme sets him up to be. There is a dramatic narrative evolving and if a promised twist never evolves, well, it won’t be that upsetting. Because getting to this point has been an emotional realisation. The connections feel real. And isn’t that what matters? How we feel, now, watching something, that’s what really strong viewing should be.
But the suspense has been constructed in a smart, interlacing manner. If you are watching, you may feel the same. If you’re not watching; to be honest, I can’t think of one reason why you shouldn’t be.
