The Britannia Music Club was a monthly tyranny throughout my teenage years in the 90s. No sooner had I remembered to tick the box saying I didn’t want that month’s album and posted it back in time, the whole bureaucratic process started again. I spent more time filling out those forms than I did on my GCSE coursework. And if I didn’t remember, they’d send me the CD anyway (it was something awful, like Simply Red). I haven’t thought about the Britannia Music Club for more than 20 years. The new Netflix comedy Everything Sucks! reminded me of it – and much more. Trolls. Snap bracelets. Grungy checked shirts. Pop tarts.
It’s 1996, and the end of the first week of term at Boring high school, in Boring, Oregon – a name you feel is going to be played on with tedious frequency. Freshman Luke (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) arrives home with new friend Kate (Peyton Kennedy): a sweet, reserved girl in a Tori Amos T-shirt, who also happens to be the principal’s daughter. There’s a new CD in Luke’s mailbox from a mail-order music club. “New Oasis,” he says, seeing the copy of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. “I already have it. I forgot to mail the thing back.” I remember the feeling.
He gives it to Kate – she’s a camera operator in AV (audiovisual) club and Luke is already in love with her. He has offered to fix the focus on her video camera, which he does in the garage while they exchange heartfelt histories – his father abandoned him and his mother. Kate’s mother died when she was five. This is not going to go well for him. Kate is probably gay – we got an inkling from the adoring look she gave the tiresome drama club diva, Emaline, and now she’s pilfering a porn mag from Luke’s garage.
Everything Sucks!, the Netflix comedy drama, is being talked about as the show to fill your Stranger Things-shaped gap. But they don’t have much in common aside from superficialities: the deep-dive nostalgia, the high school AV club teens, riding around American suburbia on bikes. It lurches from attempts at poignancy to so-so comedy (there’s little drama). The script is as clunky as the buttons on a Walkman, particularly the dialogue between Luke and his nerd gang (McQuaid, a Big Bang Theory-style caricature of a geek, and Tyler, a sock-and-sandals-wearing Star Wars fan). The drama club “stars”, Oliver and Emaline, who stage an impromptu Romeo and Juliet-esque scene in the canteen, stabbing themselves with cutlery and a corn dog, are set up as the cartoon rebels. Kate and Tyler aside, none of them seem like convincing teenagers, something even the writers seem to acknowledge. (“I’m more like an adult than a teenager, really,” says Luke.)
It all just feels too well-worn, as if the creators took the idea of nostalgia and teenhood so far they just ended up repeating tropes. So there’s the unrequited teen romance, the geeks vs the cool kids, the desperation to lose one’s virginity and an awkward parent-walks-in-on-near-masturbation scene. The rant about how Alanis Morissette doesn’t understand the concept of irony on her song Ironic is bone tired.
More promising is Kate’s story, set against Bill Clinton’s signing in of the Defense of Marriage Act (which defined marriage as between a man and a woman). That bit of political news is awkwardly shoehorned into the school’s morning video bulletin presented by a senior who signs off with “Have a Boring day”. The Stranger Things comparison does it no favours. In itself, it’s sweet enough – the leads, Winston and Kennedy, are both fantastic, and it’s a diverting nostalgia trip for a certain generation (the end credits roll to Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger; there’s a different 90s track at the end of each episode). But, like a certain mail-order music club did, it promises much but doesn’t really deliver what you want.
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