Heartbreak High.
Okay, here’s the thing: I can’t get enough of high school TV dramas. I love how the decisions these teenagers make feel so shocking (!) while at the same time knowing that ultimately, at least for most of them, these same decisions will feel vague and hazy in a few years’ time. Very few people are making life-changing decisions in high school, and even if they do, these decisions often look different with time, begin to feel less dire, maybe, than they did back then. High school is both high stakes and sort of overlayed in a grace period that you can only really see in retrospect. I don’t know if this perspective is just because I have a concerningly bad long-term memory (my mom keeps sending me stuff from when I was in high school, and I have no recollection of any of it) or because it’s true. We forgive and forget, or at least forget, or at least, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world anymore.
I love high school TV dramas—how everybody swaps crushes and gets mad at each other and does these reckless things that seem terrifyingly embarrassing in the moment but are forgotten when the next person makes their own rash decision. Part of my pull toward these shows might also be because when I was in high school I was (at least according to my not great memory) an excruciatingly good kid. I was terrified of hell and teenage pregnancy. I was terrified of making a wrong turn (like god forbid doing a drug!) and not being able to get out of my hometown, of doing something that suddenly made me unable to start over as a quasi-adult somewhere else. (I chose Texas, which might not have been my best judgment call, but alas, here we are.) Back then, I was not (and I guess am still not) very reckless. I, in fact, cried when my friends did things that I didn’t morally approve of, was very nice but also judgmental to a T. It is maybe cathartic then to watch the teenagers of these shows—who are umpteen times less repressed than I was—boldly making their mistakes and licking their wounds without looking up to the sky, without worrying that they might get struck down if they get any more frisky.
I especially love Gen Z teen dramas because the audacity and the confidence is to a level that feels almost like a fever dream from my decrepit position as someone who went to high school before it was cool to be different. Generation and Euphoria, All-American and Heartstopper and Sex Education. Then there’s my latest favorite, Heartbreak High. Even though I think the name of this show is kind of unfortunately cheesy, the content of it is exceptionally endearing. I’m watching it in French (they say this is how you learn?) with English subtitles, so I can only speak to the experience of watching it that way, but what I love about it so far is that it seems to be a show where everyone is queer or comfortable with queerness without being a show about queerness. Very few of the characters are discovering their sexual identities, and this feels evolved to me. While I appreciate (and love) a show like Sex Education, where everyone is trying to figure themselves out, I also am really enamored by a show where the kids have figured out at least this part of themselves and don’t feel self-conscious about it.
Maybe it’s a fantasy to expect everyone, in high school, to not worry about being queer, but it is really lovely to see. Heartbreak High is normalizing a diversity of sexualities in a way that makes being bi or being gay or being nonbinary not a revelation but commonplace. This makes the show a drama that is perhaps like umpteen times more juicy because the plot line is not Am I bi? but What happens when I hook up with my ex-girlfriend’s best friend and her boyfriend and then my ex-girlfriend finds out about it and now she won’t date me again? It’s not Am I nonbinary? but Yes, I’m nonbinary and gorgeous and anyway, what happens when I have a crush on this guy who is like definitely doing some shady stuff for work but he has a heart of gold and if he just had better friends we could probably run off into the sunset together?
The show feels smart—especially in its plot lines—and confident and even though there’s a scarcity of Black characters (with one brilliant exception being James Majoos, who plays the character Darren gorgeously), there is a diversity to the cast that does not feel forced or performative most of the time. The show is a teenage show, sure, and I’m not saying it’s the best thing you’ll ever watch, but it is true that I can’t stop watching it. With all of the utter chaos that’s dumped on us these days, it is really comforting and relieving to see—at least on TV—young people (I know I’m young too but I’m talking about young people) comfortable in who they are and given enough room to be comfortable, enough love and grace and friendship to be terrible and to make mistakes and to be rash in a way that I could never when I was sixteen but to be protected and seen anyway. I love Heartbreak High for its specificity and its evolvement, for how everybody is queer or queer-adjacent and how messy they are without their identity—who they are—being the mess. While of course figuring out yourself is messy too and a process sometimes, it is nice to see a teen show that does not make this the plot, that lets people be who they are and gives them everyday juicy teenage problems to deal with because that is what we’re here to see. I want to see them be who I wasn’t in high school. I want to see them break a heart or two! For so many people to break so many hearts that the high school itself becomes known for it.
Image: Netflix
