'Never Have I Ever' Helps Us Reconcile With Our High School Selves

By Alberto Cox Délano | TV | June 13, 2023 |

By Alberto Cox Délano | TV | June 13, 2023 |

High School is the worst period in any person’s life, and that’s just if you are white, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied. There’s a good counterargument that adulthood is even worse because you have to fend for yourself, and the freedom you supposedly gain is just a fragile illusion subject to the whims of capitalism. But High School is even worse because it’s the one stage of your life where nothing is nuanced, everyone reverts to a zero-sum social structure, and also, your body is changing in embarrassing ways all the f**king time.

As an adult, people mostly follow the guidelines of a social contract, and when they break it, they become the main character on Twitter or something. There is no social contract during High School; everyone can be at their worst at any moment, and if you are not the one being The Worst, you will be on the receiving end of someone being The Worst. Never Have I Ever remembers this, unlike the vast majority of US movies and TV series centered on the teenage experience. But it also reminds us that we could also be pretty freaking OK when we were in High School.

With its final season, Never Have I Ever stuck the landing and did what was once thought impossible: a mainstream US TV series about teenagers, on Netflix of all places, that is certain to become a classic of media centered on teenagers. Because when it comes to teenagers and Hollywood, the landscape is dire: It’s either glossy, unrealistic, boring, dumb, and oversexualized dramas about wealthy teens portrayed by actors in their late 20s (Beverly Hills 90210, The O.C., Gossip Girl) or annoying, bombastic, dumb, and oversexualized dramas centered on middle-class teens portrayed by actors in their late 20s (13 Reasons Why, Euphoria, Glee, Ginny & Georgia). The vast majority of media for teens produced by Hollywood seems to be made by people who either hate teenagers (especially girls) or have no idea what teenagers are like at the moment.

Never Have I Ever did whatever the opposite of what Hollywood thinks you should do with a series about teens. It’s funny, and the stakes are portrayed for what they are: objectively small but huge if you are that age. The characters are well-rounded and three-dimensional, but there are moments in which they will act like stereotypes, as High School compels you to do. It’s sympathetic and loving to adult figures but knows exactly how to — in Mulaney’s words — mock them with laser-guided precision. Thus far, it shares the same traits with two other Hollywood classics about High School: Mean Girls and Lady Bird. But it does one more thing to break with Hollywood: Its lead characters are mostly People of Color, with its central character being a US girl of Indian descent, actually a teenager at the moment of starting production. But more importantly, Never Have I Ever takes us on a trip back to the things about being a teenager that we don’t want to face: the way we were, the shit we had to experience, and how we chose to respond to it. For its characters and those of us lucky enough, High School was just a ceaseless string of small humiliations and social faux pas, but the kind that sometimes mark you for life.

As of writing this, Never Have I Ever is the most-watched series on Netflix pretty much everywhere. Not necessarily surprising for the premiere of the final season of one of Netflix’s most popular shows. What’s amazing is that a show with so much nuance and such a complex lead character could become this much of a hit. Devi (Maitrey Ramakrishnan, a star now) is a proud star student, a confident, Ivy-aiming overachiever, a proud second-generation American of Indian descent, who by virtue of her strong will, decides to do something about her dream of losing her virginity to the coolest and hottest kid in school.

But Devi is not just a nerd trying to get in with the cool kids because she, like all teens, already displays the elements of her character that are non-negotiable: She is strong-willed, she is deeply proud of being nerdy, Indian, overachieving, and clear about where she wants to go. Her fellow nerdy friends, theater kid Eleanor (Ramona Young) and science nerd Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez), are her center. She is resourceful, kind, and hard-working. But she is also self-centered, hot-headed, arrogant, emotionally unstable, and has a unique ability to make herself fall into one cringe-worthy situation after another. Like, she is a gravity that attracts cringe.

One thing that makes High School so horrifying is that whatever you do, there will be a group of peers that will find it cringe, and their opinion will matter, even when it actually shouldn’t. Devi manages to be cringey in absolute and relative ways… in ways that probably each and every one of us has been at one point. And that’s what makes her one of the most endearing, complex, and lovable characters on TV right now and by far one of the best in media for teens. The entirety of the cast is just as inspired, going through almost every High School archetype that we’ve grown to dismiss and turning them inside out: The histrionic theater kid is insecure and is missing something in her life, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t fully in love with performing. The shy, disciplined science nerd does fear that her family won’t accept her queerness, but she is also brilliant and, well, just the best. And the hot, popular jock is also terrified about his future and his identity, even though he relishes in ruling the school as a good king. As for the adults, for once, a show about teenagers shows them being mostly right and competent. This is perhaps the only unrealistic part about Never Have I Ever, but sometimes we need a bit of fantasy, even for a show as grounded as this one. Plus, Poorna Jagannathan gets to play a dry, witty badass as Devi’s mom, making her even more of… well, the other “plot” of this show I love. Respectfully. And having it all narrated by the ironically cranky voice of John McEnroe, as if it were a tennis match, is just chef-kisses inspired. The soundtrack rules too.

Beneath its grounded comedy and bittersweet moments, Never Have I Ever’s greatest accomplishment is in being a sort of exposure therapy to our teenage selves. Every cringe or awful thing Devi and her friends do is something we can relate to, it matches the things we had to go through, did, or said that we don’t want to remember, but we should (more so if you were also a star student poorly dealing with mental health issues). Because we are not kind, at all, to our teenage selves. To reconcile with your childhood self, if you had a normal life, is actually pretty easy. Not so much with our dumb, dumb, pretentious teen selves, it’s really hard. It requires the kind of self-honesty that Never Have I Ever has in bulk, a rarity among media about teenagers, and also the reason why I think it appeals beyond us Millennials and Gen Zers (my mom loves it!). Gen Zers have no idea how lucky they are that they have this to represent them and not … Skins.

Alberto Cox must admit he was a theater kid too, but only in Senior Year.