Boo, Bitch

Far be it from me to tell the kids how to dress. But why do so many shows' costume choices feel like the sartorial equivalent of a 38-year-old accountant ...

The bolder and weirder youth fashion gets on TV, the wider the door opens for real-life teens everywhere to dabble and experiment with their self-expression. That’s not to say that every teen on every teen show should dress like someone you’d see down the aisle at the grocery store. And besides, it’s always more fun to watch a show go over-the-top with its wardrobe choices than to see the pendulum swing in the opposite direction. Still, as more and more shows try to capture today’s teens’ take on Clueless chic, the efforts can feel strained. Sometimes, however, the youth’s adoration for power clashing and decade blending seems to short circuit the adults tasked with replicating (and heightening) teen fashion on screen. It’s been decades since anyone could honestly expect a kid on most teen TV shows to dress like one of the mop-heads you might find at your local skate park.

The limited series starring To All the Boys' breakout Lana Condor as an embodied ghost starts off irreverent and devolves into nonsense.

Condor is an appealing actor who seems to relish the 180 – she can pull off the role of stone-faced high school villain – but even she can’t compensate for the show’s abrupt heel turn, nonsensical plot (even for a story about a ghost) and very loose handling of grief. The final two episodes demand that the audience acknowledge the death of a loved one – ghosts can’t stick around forever, after all – but not care enough to actually think about what that means nor tease it out for anything beyond a quick resolution. By the sixth episode, I already missed the innocence of watching the first 30 minutes and not knowing how annoyingly, unnecessarily mean Erika would become. In search of any helpful info beyond The Sixth Sense and Patrick Swayze in Ghost, the two enlist a student supernatural club, whose medium, Gavin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) takes a rare interest in Gia. The gleefully bonkers quartet, including wannabe magician Brad (Reid Miller) and psychic Raven (Abigail Achiri), are the funniest part of the show – I laughed at a good third of their lines. In her terms: “Till I figure out my unfinished business, I’m going to get down to business.” (Again, the line between hokey and camp is hard to parse.) We meet Erika and Gia 48 hours “pre-mortem”, on the precipice of their final six weeks of high school.

Boo, Bitch! Premiere: Grade Netflix's Ghostly Lana Condor Comedy Series. By Andy Swift / July 8 2022, 4:00 PM PDT. Boo Bitch Netflix.

Weigh in via our polls below, then drop a comment with more of your thoughts. Heck, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also see shades of Matty McKibben in Boo, Bitch!‘s dreamy-but-sensitive male lead. But for Erika, it’s more like purgatory.)

Lana Condor is charming in Netflix's supernatural high school comedy, but the show is much too slight for its own good.

The young girls naturally turn to pop culture for clues, digging into everything from Ghostbusters and Ghost to The Sixth Sense, and figure that Erika just has unfinished business in this world before she can depart in peace. It’s what drives Gia and Erika to try all the new things (drinks! edibles! who do I yet want to be?), Boo, Bitch feels thematically on point and Condor is charming as Erika, even as she’s initially called to play a character whose mantra is “Better to be unseen than seen.” Borrowing from the Buffy playbook, here is a supernatural narrative that hopes to illuminate a very ordinary plight: not just feeling unseen but feeling like no one might actually miss you if you just disappeared. To be fair, she and Gia had already tried to make the most of their last two months as high school seniors. Having dutifully played the wallflowers for much of their time at school, the BFFs had decided to make up for lost time. Convinced she has unfinished business, Erika decides to make the most of this odd second chance.

Boo, Bitch is now streaming on Netflix. What is the comedy miniseries about? We shared the synopsis and so much more right here.

Then, one day, Erika and her best friend Gia decide they want to experience their last days as seniors living their best life, so they engage in a wild night out. she’s a motherf*%king ghost. The story follows a high school senior named Erika Vu, who has stayed under the radar for most of her high school experience.