I have read Jay Asher 13 Reasons Why not long after it was originally published in 2007. The story about a teenage girl who commits suicide and leaves behind 13 tapes with 13 reasons for taking his life, it was very heavy, but one that I feel good reading. I was in my 20 years of age at the time, is more ancient than the main character, Hannah Baker, but I could not help but feel his pain of wanting to make friends and fall in love and be normal, only for things to constantly beat you down. It was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I was curious to see how Netflix would handle the adaptation when the story first fell on the streamer in 2017.
Katherine Langford took on the role of Hannah, and it did no justice. Along with Dylan Minnette as the other main character, Clay Jensen, Langford made me feel Hannah’s pain in a way that you can’t always get in a book. And although the show was very graphic — including rape and the suicide in great detail that made the book justice. It was not a spectacle that was for the whole world, and mental health professionals involved in the show and it turns out to be problematic for some audiences. A couple of months after that aired, the suicide scene was edited and a warning was added to episodes to guide people in getting help if they were struggling themselves.
That’s the first reason this show should not have gone beyond the first season.
“It became a show that was dependent on the value of the shock, cramming in every single thing that warrants a warning before the show”.
As much as I liked the show, I didn’t need the story to continue beyond the book. The book had a clear ending, and future seasons he took his own life. Instead of allowing the program to terminate with all of Hannah’s reasons treaties and their history to be put to rest, the show left open season with so many things that never happened in the book — like Alex Standall potentially killing himself from decisions in future seasons of a great starting of the story.
That is the second reason why the show should not have gone beyond the first season.
What is really unfortunate about seasons, two, three, and four of 13 Reasons Why is that the students become more unpleasant, the crimes become more serious, the show becomes more graphic. And yet, through it all, it’s forgettable. I couldn’t even tell you what happens in season two, other than the judgment about Hannah’s life and death and Bryce Walker’s responsibility in all of this. The third season took another detour concentrating all his energy in Bryce, and trying to redeem him despite the fact that the violations to the people and he is an absolute assh*le?!
After the absolute mess of the third season, really, really should not have been a fourth season. But, unfortunately, a fourth season that we did get. The fourth season is simply bizarre. Of the 10 episodes, I would say that for the first seven or eight to feel like a simple horror movie. From the creepy music horror-like cinematography and Clay of the mental instability, it feels like you are living on the inside of your head starts to break down.
It feels absolutely nothing, as when the show started in the year 2017 and Asher book in 2007. It became a show that was dependent on the value of the shock, cramming in every single thing that warrants a warning before the show. In season four alone, we have had to deal with the racism, the brutality of the police, in a shooting in the school, mental instability, and AIDS-related death. And I know that these things are real-world problems, but to throw them all in one single season of a show after you have already spoken with the suicide, the rape, the murder and the excessive consumption of alcohol and consumption of drugs it just feels like too much.
As the program progressed and moved more and more away from the original story, I like the first season of less, because it felt contaminated. I’ve had similar feelings about Big Little Lies when the show got a second season that was much beyond the book. In a similar way, the second season of the program collapsed, that was incredibly well done the first season, but at least the showrunners not to pursue the stations. Netflix, on the other hand, kept stringing the viewers along for more stations 13 Reasons Whyand , now, as a viewer, I am so far away from the heartbreaking original story that I am angry-watching the show to find out how it ends, so I can check a box on my head.
I entered in the fourth of the season with low expectations after seasons two and three, which by the way made me despise them less than I expected, and although there were a couple of moments that I liked, I was absolutely crazy when Justin Foley was killed off in the end. Netflix spent a long time in the past few seasons building him up to a respectable teenager about to go to college and make something of himself, despite having problems in the upbringing, and the struggle just to get through a day, only for him to die of AIDS-related complications in the end.
That ending was the nail in the coffin for me that this show absolutely and without a doubt should have ended after season one.
