This was, for me, the best show of the year so far. It is for Netflix this year what _Stranger Things_ was for last year. A real surprise, far better than it looks. I watched the special, and I don't usually do that. I picked up the book and started reading it, and young adult fiction isn't a genre I usually look at. Hollywood hasn't cast it in a very nice light with things like _Twilight_; even less cringey films like _Divergent_ and _The Maze Runner_ give the YA genre a two-dimensional feel, a feel of shallowness that is easy to take in but doesn't really get inside your head much. Just a one-and-done kind of thing. And this isn't that. It's so much better. I went in thinking this was a show for middle and high school kids, and it really isn't. Especially after the 9th and 12th episodes. Not to mention the finale. Spoilers follow.

After watching — I finished it just 24 hours ago — I went back and forth on whether the suicide was justified or not. Actually for a while I thought they might pull a twist ending and reveal that she didn't actually go through with it, but made it look like she did to raise awareness. There was a program that ran in high schools in Northern California (where this takes place) where they had a guy dressed up like the Grim Reaper take the popular jocks out of school. They were put up in a resort while the rest of the school was told they died. And then they put on this play where they were killed by drunk driving. It sounds silly now, but it was serious then. And it happened at my school (Santa Rosa, Montgomery High, Class of 1998) and I was smart enough to see that it was fiction, but it still young enough for it to affect me. (Sure enough, never drank and drove. Actually don't drink anymore, so I can drive those who can't.) So I thought this series might be doing that, and that they could, and still be impactful. Spoiler: [spoiler]It's not, and the suicide is shown in the finale.[/spoiler]

As for justifications, that's harder. It's important to note here that nobody is perfect, including the adults. It's also important to note that nobody is purely good or evil. Even the one character everyone hates by the end ([spoiler]Bryce{/spoiler]), probably has some good in him. It's just outside the scope of this show to humanize him. We can guess. [spoiler]He was rich, and lived a life free of consequences. His parents were never around, and he was able to buy beer underage because he was a successful athlete and town hero. He literally stated that there was nothing wrong with raping girls. And he believed it because he had never been denied anything.[/spoiler] The big problem I have with the suicide is not that the events leading up to it did or didn't justify suicide. It's that she spent hours calmly laying out everything that was wrong, in a cool and methodical way, on those tapes, after making the decision, and yet she still did it. The planning of the tapes, the recording, setting up distribution, [spoiler]getting Tony to manage the backups and watching people,[/spoiler], I think she could have backed down. I think she was smart enough to _by that point_ and could have gotten help. No tapes, no planning? Sure. Impulse decision. After all that, though? I don't really see it.

I'd also like to get into the school counselor, Mr Porter. School counselors are psychologists only in the same sense that security guards are police officers, i.e. they're not. You could say they're failed psychologists, and maybe some are, but they may not all be. He wasn't an exceptionally bad one. He might have even been above average. I think a big difference between school counselors and psychologists are that school counselors work for the school. They aren't truly advocates for the individuals they try to help. I think he needed to go the extra mile and coach her, and tell her that she needs to declare [spoiler]that she was raped, and that she said no, and that she tried to make him stop, even if she really didn't exactly. There was no deception on her part, or seduction, the guy had raped before, and in her presence no less, and she clearly did not want to have sex, and he knew it[/spoiler]. Yes, I think he should have coached her to embellish the truth a little for the greater good, for the sake of the next victim. Would it have been dishonest? I don't think so. No more spoilers.

But I'm getting off-track. Was it a good series? In no uncertain terms, yes it was. You should absolutely watch it, and then you absolutely should reach out to a niece or a nephew or the child of a family friend and let them know that you are there for them. It doesn't really help as much coming from parents, because parents are always judging. They kind of have to. Kids need an external resource they can count on. Someone they trust won't look down on them because they tried drugs or experimented with sex. Someone who won't add to their problems. Someone who generally makes them feel better when they're down. Even popular kids need it, but the nerds, the emo kids, the losers, those kids need it especially because they have such little support from their peers. And yes it's a bit rude to use those labels, but they exist, those kids exist, and we can't let them slip through the cracks. And one photo, one tweet, one rumor can make the most popular kid in school join those unfortunate groups. And then that kid can go on fooling their parents into thinking they're still on top of the social ladder, when inside they're dying, and we see that in the show with one of the characters.