SPOILER WARNING: this post contains mild spoilers for Heartbreak High. Last night I finished watching season one of Heartbreak High. I don’t know what it is about queer high school dramas but I just love this stuff. Besides, I mostly write YA, so it’s right up my alley. After watching a few episodes and with the hype around it, I thought I’d finally do a first review/essay on this blog (since it's not all supposed to be about writing. Shocking, I know!). To be fair, though, this isn’t really a review per se. I just thought I’d talk about some ideas as well as similarities and differences between this show and two other prominent (in my eyes) teenage high school dramas, Euphoria and Sex Education, and their relation with the reality of high school. So this is maybe more of an essay, though a personal one at that, because I’ll also be talking about my experience of high school, as a student, but also as a teacher (yeah, I really did get to experience the best of both worlds!). realism and expectations... I know very little about the high school experience in America and even less in Australia. I was in middle school in the US for one tiny year and then spent all my high school years in a scientific high school in the middle of the Alps (taking a shot every time I mention the Alps in my posts would make a great drinking game haha). The media and, unfortunately, the news, is where I get my information about the American high school experience, which of course I take with a pile of salt. My seven year-old self, on the other hand, probably truly thought American high school students broke into song every lunch to sing Stick to the Status Quo. Needless to say, these shows are somewhat expected to hold up a mirror to the high school experience. My question then is, to what extent do these series really showcase authentic high school experiences, especially when it comes to relationships, sex, and drama? This may come across as extremely nerdy, but my experience or knowledge of drama in high school came nothing close to any of the above mentioned series. Maybe it was because I wasn’t interested in sex, or because I was just hanging out with geeks, but I heard and took part in like literally no drama at school. That is unless you count drama as in theatre drama in which case yes, I did dabble in that area, having been the co-founder of the school's drama club. There were no relationships or gossip thereof that I was interested in. Thinking back I knew only about one relationship as far as I remember between one acquaintance from my class and I guy I barely knew. Could I have produced any gossip about that relationship? Absolutely not. I knew they were together and that was it. Done deal. Finito. As you may have gathered this far, those years came nowhere close to what I’ve seen depicted in media. Maybe it's a difference between schools in English speaking countries and in France, but I’m suspecting that it’s just because the school I went to was pretty academic. Definitely not because I was (and am still) a nerd and had no interest in all that drama back in the day. On a somewhat related note, there's a similar aspect of unrealistic depiction when it comes to high school parties. Could any party depicted in these dramas have been an actual high school party in real life? I know that the budget of these shows is more than enough to create aesthetic and grandiose settings, but by going all the way, the shows inevitably lose the authenticity of mediocre but realistic school parties and shows. Especially the Snow Ball in Stranger Things is just clearly too good to be true. Pictured above: A party from Euphoria; the theatre show from Sex Education; the Snow Ball from Stranger Things. But back to all the drama, the worst of school I’ve personally seen pertained to middle school – as a student and as a teacher. Then again, all of what I witnessed was bullying and violence, towards other students and towards teachers. There wasn't really any other sort of drama. Speaking of teaching, having been a teacher for a year (more than enough!), I had a somewhat hard time seeing the treatment of Jojo Obah, the teacher in Heartbreak High, but at least I can say that that aspect was more than believable. Though, to be fair, if I had been in her place, nothing would have ever convinced me to return. After all, my students also told me I was a great teacher, and so did my colleagues, but my goodness, if you want to become a teacher you better have a heart of steel, because kids are evil. So neither my high school experience nor middle school experience came close to these series. However, that's not saying that there was never a time when life didn't feel like it was pulled out of one of the shows. As a matter of fact, my University experience definitely had a vibe more similar to Heartbreak High than anything else. Relationships were all over the place and my friends and I could draw relationship maps that would have looked just like those in the first episode. It’s kind of ironic, as Universities are so much vaster and bigger than high schools and yet, it was like we were living in this tiny world of drama in every corner. It was in that aspect that the show comes closest to my experience of ✨ reality ✨. But these shows don't portray University experiences: they're about teenagers in high school. So when sex is brought to the forefront of their experiences, this can lead to other questions. relationships and sex in high school dramas One of the downsides of the shows like the ones I am presently talking about is the sexualization of the teenage experience. I think it's really great that the shows really try to raise awareness about aspects surrounding sex such as STDs and consent. In the end, the shows are probably teaching people more about sex than school sex education ever did. But still, does this really reflect the high school student experience? And does that even matter? Whether the shows are realistic or not, they send a message of what might be expected of teenagers of that age. I'm definitely not saying that the shows are pushing a message that people should be in relationships at that age, I'm just saying that by portraying their experience as such, it makes it seem like not being a part of it means one is not in the norms, or missing out on the teenage experience. The people who are left out are the ones who don’t feel like delving into the waters of relationships and sex yet, or at all. I like what they did with Cash and asexual representation, but at the end of the day, the whole series, just like Euphoria and Sex Education, centrally evolves around the idea that most (if not all) high schoolers engage in sex, and a lot of it at that. Even in Sex Education, when we get characters who are scared of being left behind, they still end up being in relationships! I wonder how teenagers who watch these shows feel when they haven’t really thought about sex that much, or weren’t interested. Even if it’s subconscious, would it really be surprising if they felt a bit of pressure to be like the characters and not be left behind? I honestly don’t know how these shows would have changed my perspective on my high school years had I watched them at the age of 15-17. For context, back in the day I was watching Supernatural and reading Hunger Games. No real high school experience pointers there. The nearest thing I got to high school representation were either fantasies like H**** P***** and Percy Jackson, or just flat out depressing stories like Perks of Being a Wallflower. While pretty dark at times, these depictions really didn’t focus that much on teens having outright sex in their high school years, unlike the series at hand. I’m guessing it also has to do with a generational shift. Back in the day you couldn’t just bring out a series like Euphoria without probably getting a huge bunch of outrage and backlash. Whatever the reason, whether it had to do with how things tended to be censored before, or that writers are just more explicit nowadays, we can’t deny that explicit shows are more and more common and therefore less shocking to general audiences. Back in the day, the most explicit show I watched was Game of Thrones, and I thought that was, at times, a lot. So I can't even fathom my younger self watching Euphoria. Thank goodness it hadn't come out back then! That show has been, by far, the most explicit show I have ever watched. And I still don’t know how I feel about it. In that sense, Sex Education is much less explicit and does a bit of a better job using different situations to tackle different issues. Heartbreak High definitely doesn’t go the route of Euphoria-type explicit content, and that was, ironically, a nice break from the usual teenage series. Am I starting to sound like a boomer? I don’t know, but in any case, I stand by the fact that every scene needs to have reason to be there and tie in to the plot, and definitely shouldn’t just be there for shock value. Again, trust me, I’m a film graduate. Is Heartbreak High the Australian Euphoria?I’ve seen people talk about how they saw Heartbreak High as the Australian Euphoria, and while there are definitely similarities, at their core, they still differ quite a bit. Similarities exist, certainly. One can definitely draw the parallels between Euphoria and Heartbreak High, even visually. There’s one scene in particular that I'll use as example because while watching it I was like: 'that's Euphoria!'. It's a scene from the finale episode of HH that looks like it might have been pulled directly from the other show, both involving one of the main characters running away from cops down an almost identical looking street. I know that comparison is just based on visuals, but the scene really stood out as a visual parallel. On the story side, while there are overlapping elements, like high school relationship drama and drugs, the perspectives we get are quite contrasting. The shows differ mostly in the fact that Euphoria really centers around Rue’s experience and perspective as a drug addict, whereas HH feels a tad more decentralized from the main character. The general feel of the shows also differ. While there are dark moments in HH, Euphoria as a whole is much darker than the latter. Another notable element that differentiates the three shows is the setting. In Sex Education, we get a weird mix between Britain and America. Euphoria, on the other hand, is easy to recognize as taking place in California. But HH breaks away from both shows by being set in Australia. I know the series is a reboot of an Australian series of the same name, but it's still nice to get media from other English speaking countries. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I saw a show taking place in Australia. Needless to say, it’s a nice change from the usual. I love seeing series that really feel authentic and where foreign watchers will not necessarily get the jokes, references, or slang. That’s what I love about series taking place in France for example (and no, I’m not talking about Emily in Paris. I will never ever watch that show). That’s what I also enjoyed about watching all the different versions of SKAM back in the day. It gives viewers the opportunity to see how the cultures make the stories different. ✨ My rating ✨ So yeah, those were some elements I thought were interesting to talk about, let me know what you think! This definitely was neither a very serious essay, nor a professional review, but still, I thought I’d give the series a rating anyway. If it wasn't clear from what I've written above, I thoroughly enjoyed Heartbreak High. It had great casting, well developed characters, and a good plot that kept the story enticing until the end. There was also very nice representation, including authentic autistic representation which I don’t believe I’ve seen before. I could go on a rant about Good Doctor but I won’t. To put a long story short, I don’t see why neurotypical people should ever play neurodivergent characters. Though really rough at times, all in all, it was a feel-good series with a lot of wholesome moments. The ending was satisfying and didn’t leave too many loose ends, all while keeping enough elements open-ended to definitely garner a second season. J. Dietz’s certified rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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