Only seconds into Everything Sucks, the new 10-episode Netflix series set in the 1990s, teenage boys debate whether there should be Star Wars prequels like 30-year-old men on Twitter. And then, faster than you can say ‘don’t have a cow, man’, they shift to arguing whether the Alanis Morissette song ‘Ironic’ contains any irony at all like they’re filing a searing hot take.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf_YjzEvYeQ
As is probably evident already, Everything Sucks is a bizarre teenage drama that applies a nostalgic view of the ’90s expressed in the vernacular of 2018 onto a show set in 1996 that becomes a flimsy excuse to smash through references like plot and character don’t matter.
In the town of Boring, Oregon, an aspiring filmmaker (Jahil Di’Allo Winston) and his friends (Rilo Mangini, Peyton Kennedy and Quinn Liebling) in the AV Club form an uneasy alliance with the drama club (Sydney Sweeney and Elijah Stevenson) to make a short film after an incident puts the two groups at odds with each other.
But Everything Sucks plays less like a television series and more like a listicle about the ’90s designed to hit the worst nostalgic impulses, and present the decade as a retro time to a new generation. After fantasising about the ’80s for so long it makes sense that the ’90s is now considered kitsch enough to yield a show like Everything Sucks but co-creators, Ben York Jones and Michael Mohan deliver a misfire.
It continually riffs on ’90s references to the point that it becomes nauseating.
In Everything Sucks, it matters more for a character to have a Tamagotchi than to explain why they have a digital pet in the first place. The show never attempts to contextualise anything properly: it continually riffs on ’90s references to the point that it becomes nauseating.
There’s a stomach churning scene that’s supposed to pass as charming in which the AV Club gang re-create music videos from the ’90s, mainly Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’. If you thought it was irritating when anyone with a pulse and an acoustic guitar played ‘Wonderwall’, just wait until you see this!
The teenagers end up being an afterthought, empty vessels to fill with a cornucopia of pop culture references. Jones and Mohan never let their characters experience and respond to the decade they’re living in, and they let the time period define every action and piece of dialogue.
[It’s] Stranger Things meets Dawson’s Creek meets Freak and Geeks – Everything Sucks amplifies the worst elements of each [of these].
As you meet each character you care less about who they are and more about the algorithm that got this show made. Stranger Things meets Dawson’s Creek meets Freak and Geeks – normally having these shows mentioned would be a compliment, but Everything Sucks amplifies the worst elements of each.
In that way, Everything Sucks becomes an admirable feat of Netflix engineering but a dud when it comes to storytelling. There are moments where Jones and Mohan veer away from the clichés associated with coming-of-age stories, such as a queer sub-plot focusing on one of the AV Club, Kate, but it still smacks of two male writers fumbling their way through proceedings.
Everything Sucks stays true to its namesake when it comes to execution, so it gets points for honesty, but it shows the churn and degradation of the current obsession with nostalgia in pop culture through the Netflix algorithm.
Everything Sucks is available to stream on Netflix now.
