I watched the start of Home Fires season 2 last Sunday. I couldn’t remember all the characters, so had to re-watch season 1 (on Prime). Luckily it is only 6 episode.
I’m not understanding much of American Crime this season. I’m still watching, but I’m not getting how all the pieces fit.
DH and I love Humans! It’s much better than I thought it would be. I just watched the first episode of 13 Reasons Why and I’m hooked. I’m looking forward to the next season of Better Call Saul.
Did someone here suggest “Harry”? If so, thank you. It’s engrossing.
I’m not sure how I felt about WestWorld
Season 2 of The Get Down came to Netflix this weekend. Already watched it all and sadly, that’s it, story told and done 
I loved that series.
The Leftovers starts this weekend, on Easter Sunday, appropriately enough. TiVo is set. Looks like they were running a marathon today, Saturday. Wish I had known. Looking forward to what is supposed to be the last season.
13 Reasons Why. Watched it over 3 days, was hard to stop. A lot to process, difficult, but it hooked me quickly. You know how it ends from the beginning but there are a lot of twists and turns. Got connected to the characters.
I recommend it.
I started 13 Reasons Why last night. Immediately hooked. H lost interest during the first episode. He still doesn’t “get” the high school drama. He attended an all boys school so had a different experience.
I was really surprised to get hooked so quickly @psychmomma . And once it ends I (and apparently most people as its’ the most online-discussed Netflix series ever) feel like talking about it.
I didn’t have many experiences like that in my tiny Quaker HS but a local HS just made the news for having a “NCAA bracket style” ranking of female students’ various attributes. Similar to some college sports teams rankings/descriptions of women via email lists that have also been in the news lately.
I’ve held off on watching 13 Reasons because of some recent local issues with suicide. I’m somewhat protective of my emotions in that regard, but I’m also not impossibly fragile. Would you recommend waiting, or is it worth dealing with?
I am a volunteer crisis counselor with Crisis Text Line (http://crisistextline.org) and we have had many, many, many texters who were disturbed by 13 Reasons, including people older than the median age (20-ish) who had triggers to past experiences.
I feel an obligation to watch but haven’t done so yet.
I personally “felt an obligation” to watch so didn’t for however many weeks it’s been out, so was surprised when I genuinely enjoyed it.
To me the suicide aspect was less prominent than the bullying aspect, though people probably react to it in very different ways. I’ve read some criticisms of it from various angles and I see them, and get how it can be triggering. I had one of her key experiences - trying to not spoil here for those of you who haven’t seen it - as a teenager myself, and it certainly came to my mind. But I’ve come to terms with that over the decades since.
In the context of this thread, I am only suggesting it as an entertaining series to watch. I was really into it, even when it made me mad or sad.
I actually stopped watching it three eps in…and am hanging in limbo…because of the events that happen at the end which I hear are all too realistic. I am prone to being triggered, so…
I watched the first episode over the weekend, based on the recommendations here. On the one hand, it seemed engaging, and I liked the main characters. On the other, I felt really uncomfortable with all the deliberate sexiness – the beautiful girl (and we are constantly being reminded just how beautiful she is) teasing everyone from beyond the grave. No.
Also, I am heartily sick of watching actors in their mid-20s playing high school sophomores. It’s OK if they hire great looking actors, but I really appreciate it if the actors look like great-looking 16-year-olds, not adults. (If they look like 30-year-olds, like Seth Rogen in Freaks and Geeks, they had better really be 16, like Seth Rogen in Freaks and Geeks.) It’s one thing to have that in an obvious fantasy, and quite another in a show that purports to address real issues directly.
I haven’t watched it, and don’t want my 14-year-old to watch it because he is statistically at risk.
Our high school sent the following message to all parents:
Thanks @Ynotgo, I printed that up. I had not hear about 13 reasons before this thread.
I asked D21 if she had heard about it and she had. she has no desire at this point to watch or read it. She did say kids at her school are reading the book and passing it around.
I have been watching it, but I think I am going to stop. There’s little question in my mind that it glamorizes suicide, by showing the suicide as having tremendous impact on the peers she cared about, and how everyone “guilty” is punished appropriately but the best among them learn from it. But the “13 Reasons” of the story (most of them) have little or nothing to do with real-life suicide. I don’t think young people kill themselves because boys are immature jerks and girlfriends are not always reliable.
Thinking about it in connection with watching this show, I was kind of stunned to realize how much more close experience of suicide my children had in their teens and early 20s compared to me. When I was growing up, there was only one suicide that affected anyone I actually knew – the father of a friend committed suicide when we were 13. (We weren’t allowed to acknowledge it was suicide, however. Officially, he fell out of his 20th floor office window.) One or two college acquaintances were rumored to have attempted suicide sometime in the past. Otherwise, suicide was entirely a literary phenomenon for me. Mary Shelley, Sylvia Plath, Yukio Mishima, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, and of course Werther, Smerdyakov, and Anna Karenina.
My kids each had at least one fairly close friend attempt suicide while they were in high school, and each had a classmate he or she knew and liked but was less close to who killed herself. A boy with whom they were very close as children and who remained an old friend killed himself at 22, and his younger sister had several suicide attempts before that. The older brother of one of my daughter’s best friends killed himself when they were in high school, and the ex-boyfriend of a close college friend killed himself in a horrific manner. My daughter, as a high school senior, had to make a decision to tell a really close friend’s parents that the friend had attempted suicide.
However, none of those situations is remotely represented in 13 Reasons. Significant drug and alcohol abuse figured prominently in most of them. All of the completed suicides involved clear, long-term, diagnosed mental health issues where treatment had been suspended for one reason or another. Some of the subjects were more social than others, but social issues with peers were barely involved. College admission and academic pressures, and the transition from high school to college or college to life, were much more prominent surface issues, although discounted by friends as not the “real” problems. Family dynamics – barely a topic of interest in 13 Reasons – also played a prominent role.
The friend/ex-boyfriend incident provides an especially sharp contrast with the glamour of 13 Reasons. In that case, as on the show, the suicide wanted to make certain a peer who had abandoned him was punished. Drunk and high, he called her on the phone, and told her exactly what he was doing as he prepared to hang himself. She pleaded with him to stop, frantically found someone to call 911 while she stayed on the line with him, and ultimately had to listen to him die with the sirens of emergency vehicles audible in the background. It was awful – cruel, tawdry, and completely gratuitous, because objectively the ex-girlfriend had nothing to do with his issues besides happening to be around as the final nose-dive began. (It hadn’t been a long relationship at all – 2-3 months of romantic involvement, broken off a couple of months earlier largely thanks to his untreated depression and self-medication.) Of course, she was devastated, but the lesson she learned had nothing to do with more empathy or being a better friend. It was not romanticizing despair, and finding healthier people to hang out with.
The later reasons are a lot more serious, at least a couple of them. And family dynamics will show up eventually too.
I wasn’t interested in watching a series about suicide, actually. Netflix kept suggesting it to me and I kept not even looking at it.
I decided to watch it after I learned about the list, and recent news about a similar list at a nearby high school.
My D said she heard it was controversial because of how it portrayed kids with mental health issues. I personally didn’t think any of the characters HAD mental health issues, unless you consider anyone who commits suicide or harms others (I don’t want to spoil here for those watching so I won’t get specific) to be mentally ill. I don’t think that’s an automatic assumption.
@jhs - I can think of a lot of suicides (in the news) where the cause appears to be bullying. We had one locally - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/11/01/this-11-year-old-survived-cancer-bullying-drove-her-to-suicide-her-family-says/ - though of course there may well ahve been other issues.
That is perhaps a question for another thread (which the series might deserve so everyone can get back to favorite binge-worthy shows) - but does committing suicide always mean one is mentally ill?
I’m with @IxnayBob here - am holding off on 13 Reasons because our local community has had some recent experiences with suicides (teenage and young adult). Just not sure I could get thru it right now but I do want to keep it on my list.
Just finished watching Major Crimes on TNT (always good, love the characters), *Grace & Frankie/i on Netflix and on another site, in a nod to the thread title, Broadchurch Season 3 (David Tennant and Olivia Colman are excellent and the season was well written).
Still watching American Crime Season 3 - this season deals with the issue of servitude, im many forms. John Ridley (creator) is excellent at taking an issue and examining it from many sides and thru different lenses.
I just finished watching Season 4 of The Americans on Amazon Prime. I don’t have cable, so I have to wait another year for Season 5. I really enjoy this show.