heaped stylish, surreal fantasy onto the teens’ stories, lending them a sort of nobility that real life denied them.was aesthetically quite the opposite, but made up for it—at least in its first season—with a consuming mystery that propelled the viewer through 13 hours of teenage social exploitation.attempts a very earnest, high-production-value look at the high schoolers’ lives, focusing on five in particular.
The engaging Jayson , another lead, faces a similar flatness. His character’s story is arguably the most serious: After a stupid prank goes wrong, he and his best friend Owen are both suspended. But because Owen had a slightly more active role, he ends up being kicked out of Grand Army for months, while Jayson returns after just two weeks.
Jayson is tortured by the discrepancy between their punishments, and further pained by the distance it creates between him and his friend, whose entire future now seems to be in jeopardy. He ends up becoming more involved in on-campus activism, specifically taking on the “zero-tolerance” policy that led to Owen’s fall from grace. It’s a powerful stance, and an important one. Other black students single out other issues, like targeted policing and asymmetrical disciplining.
In a way, Leila is a kind of brilliant character: She’s both sympathetic and steadfastly unlikeable, caught between circumstances that estrange her from her own feelings and yet prevent her from prioritizing the feelings of others.