Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why landed on March 31, 2017 with a box of cassette tapes and a dead girl’s voice. Brian Yorkey developed the series from Jay Asher’s 2007 novel Thirteen Reasons Why, with Selena Gomez as an executive producer. It follows Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette) through the aftermath of Hannah Baker’s suicide. Hannah (Katherine Langford) leaves behind tapes naming the people she holds responsible. The first season became the second most watched series on Netflix at the time of its release.
Trailer, via Netflix.
A Box of Cassette Tapes
The mechanic is the show’s best idea. Hannah narrates from beyond the grave, and Clay walks the same halls she did, hearing her voice in his headphones while the people she names walk past him. It is a clean structure for a story about blame, and the first 13 episodes use it hard.
Minnette and Langford carry it. The first season drew praise for its themes, emotional weight, subject matter, character development and acting, and the two leads are the reason. Langford left the show after the second season, and the series never found a replacement for what she was doing.
The ensemble around them is deep. Christian Navarro plays Tony Padilla, the keeper of the tapes. Alisha Boe is Jessica Davis. Brandon Flynn is Justin Foley. Justin Prentice is Bryce Walker. Miles Heizer, Ross Butler and Devin Druid fill out Liberty High.
Liberty High’s Long List of Problems
The show’s subject is not one suicide. It is the wide range of social issues affecting modern youth, and the series works through them at volume: bullying, sexual assault, addiction, gun access, a school that keeps failing the kids inside it.
That ambition is real. It is also where the show starts to strain. By season two, released May 18, 2018, the tapes are gone and the structure goes with them. What is left is a drama that keeps adding crises without a spine to hold them.
Season three arrived August 23, 2019. That same month, Netflix renewed the series for a fourth and final season. The last episodes dropped June 5, 2020. Four seasons, 49 episodes, and a slow drift from a tight mystery into a general-purpose teen drama.
The cast churned along the way. Langford exited after season two. In September 2018, Timothy Granaderos and Brenda Strong were promoted to series regulars for season three after recurring roles. Gary Sinise joined as a series regular for season four on September 5, 2019. Jan Luis Castellanos came aboard February 11, 2020, also for season four.
What the First Season Got Right
The show’s reputation rests almost entirely on those first 13 episodes, and that is fair. Clay’s slow walk through Hannah’s tapes is a genuine piece of construction. Each tape hands him a person, and each person hands him a worse version of the same town.
The show understands that a school is a system. Liberty High is not a backdrop. It is the machine that produces the outcome.
- Hannah Baker’s tapes name the people she blames
- Clay Jensen listens to them one by one
- Tony Padilla holds the originals
- Jessica Davis, Justin Foley and Bryce Walker sit at the center of what the tapes describe
- The school itself never stops
That list is the first season. Everything after it is the show trying to keep the same weight without the same engine.
The Problem With the Later Seasons
The reviews turned. The series received mixed reviews overall, and the split is easy to locate. Season one had a shape. Seasons two through four had a premise.
The later seasons kept the cast and the setting but not the engine. Without the tapes, the show had to find its weight somewhere else, and it never settled on where. None of it is bad television exactly. All of it is a different, looser show than the one that premiered in 2017.
There is a cost to that. A series built on a single act of blame has to decide what it is about once the blaming is done. 13 Reasons Why never quite answers that. It keeps the seriousness and drops the precision.
Where the Tapes Stop Working
Here is what holds. 13 Reasons Why is one strong season and three uneven ones, and the strong season is strong enough that the whole thing stays in the conversation. Minnette and Langford are the reason. The tape mechanic is the reason. The willingness to sit inside a subject most teen shows avoid is the reason.
Here is what does not. The show confuses more with deeper, and it mistakes a longer list of social issues for a fuller account of any one of them. By the end it is a drama about everything that happens to teenagers, which is a way of being about nothing in particular.
The published critical score lands at 6.0 out of 10, and that number is honest. It is not a dismissal. A 6 is what you give a show with a real idea, a real pair of performances and no plan for what comes after the idea runs out.
Worth watching: season one, start to finish. Worth knowing about: the rest. 6 of 10.
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