Because of all the positive reviews and the fact that _Skins_ is one of my favorite teen dramas of all time, I was excited to give this a watch. I was pretty surprised to find it disappointingly mediocre. This might be one of the most overhyped shows of all time; it's basically just a TV-MA rated version of _13 Reasons Why_.

My first complaint is with the way this show deals with sex. While horny teens on a quest to get some is the plot of lots of my favorite media like _The Inbetweeners_ and _Superbad_, this difference here is that this show flattens half the characters into fairly one-dimensional horndogs . Most of the male characters in this show are either some sort of sexual deviant or drooling cavemen whose only dialogue lines consist of telling girls how much they want to fuck them. The female characters, for that matter, accept with open legs any guy who asks. This drags out across every. single. episode. Virtually none of the characters are interesting; there is maybe one I care about and the rest could honestly drop dead and the show would be exactly the same.

This leads into my second complaint which is that the portrayal of adult themes just seems too unrealistic given that these are supposed to be high school students. They obviously tried as hard as they could to come up with as contrived a town as possible to set this in--pretty much every character is being raised by a single parent which I guess is supposed to help explain why they, as high school students, are basically out roaming free at night and going to house parties (in middle class suburbia, by the way) all the time. One of the girls dons full dominatrix garb and cams from her bedroom...is she not worried her parent(s) are going to walk in or even hear? Nope, parents don't really exist in this show. Another character goes out at night to fuck middle-aged men from dating apps in hotel rooms.

My third complaint is that I really don't care for the way the story is told and the scenes are shot. I'd have preferred a format where we just follow certain characters around for a while but no, we're jerked forward and backwards through the timeline by a narrator, _13 Reasons Why_ style. There are also some scenes where it takes you out of the realistic shots and cuts to wacky shots like bottles of pills animated as if they're talking, characters dressed up in costumes, or even cartoon animations. There also...isn't really much of a story. And not even in an artsy nihilistic way. In a bad way where you jump from one meaningless love triangle to another except they can hardly even be called love triangles because none of the characters really express any emotions at all.

I rank this show far below both _Skins_ and _Elite_.