We Want to Be Your SLTs!
A review of Netflix’s ‘Heartbreak High’
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰✰
Romance ✰✰✰½
Sex ✰✰✰½
Storytelling ✰✰✰✰
Performance ✰✰✰✰
Yearning ✰✰✰✰
Mild spoilers ahead!
Written by Meg Heim
I’ll be honest, everybody. I wasn’t that excited to watch Heartbreak High. I can’t quite put a finger on why, because I am a sucker for teen dramas—Degrassi, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Euphoria are all pivotal in my book. But I think it’s because one too many people compared the show to Sex Education, which is a show that I only…like? (Don’t hate me). I like it! I think it’s good! But, with the exception of Maeve, the characters all feel a little young, a little too sweet, and a little naive. The show is very intentional, thoughtful and strives for diverse representation which is important to me. But where Sex Education dips their toes, Heartbreak High has already passed the deep end swim test. This show is just so good.
Heartbreak High follows the lives of students and staff at a multicultural high school in Sydney, Australia. It begins with our two protagonists—best friends Amerie and Harper—who have, in their time at Hartley High, diligently depicted the entire school’s sexual exploits in a Pieszecki-esque chart on the wall of an out-of-bounds stairwell. The color-coded map details every possible dalliance, including ones that they hope will come to pass (i.e., a gold ‘Destined’ line connecting Amerie and her longtime crush, Dusty). On the first day of a new school year, the map is discovered and an emergency assembly is called. Witnesses point Woodsy—Hartley High’s caricature of a principal—in Amerie’s direction, who takes the fall for Harper out of loyalty. In an instant, Amerie becomes a social pariah, losing her friend group and gaining the unfortunate nickname, “Map Bitch”.
To further solidify her fall from grace, Amerie and all of her map-cohorts are required to enroll in a mandatory sexual literacy tutorial (or an…SLT) meant to address what the administration sees as a problem of hyper-sexual students. Upon hearing this abbreviation, the students quickly fill in the missing letter ‘U’ to adopt their new collective moniker: “So…we’re sluts!” (Cheering erupts).
The first episode deftly establishes the universe Heartbreak High exists in—it's a high school show, but the focus is capturing the world of these teenagers. It almost never wastes time in class—unless it's the biweekly meeting of SLTs—instead, it chooses to follow these characters through their lives at home, at parties, and at after-school jobs. They have hobbies and interests and passions. Not that homework isn’t important, but like, in the context of storytelling and high-schoolers growing into themselves, it really isn’t. I appreciated that Heartbreak High didn’t phone in a silly study date or bombed math test. It was too busy being gritty!
At the core of this story is a friendship breakup and the unendurable pain that comes from not knowing why you’ve lost that person. Our main character, Indo-Australian Amerie (played in an authentic, endearing and comically twitchy style by Ayesha Madon) is thrust into this when Harper shows up to the first day of school after being MIA for weeks and inexplicably cuts her out of her life. The loss of a friendship is a life experience that I believe we don’t talk about enough. It is a gut-wrenching, soul-cutting loss of a safe place, a happy place, a memory of laughing so hard that tears fell and you gasped for breath; it is you realizing that you never imagined looking back and seeing that memory now spoiled. Media should be about seeing something you’ve personally gone through portrayed on screen so beautifully and truthfully that it's therapeutic; tangible empathy, courtesy of Netflix. (Netflix, don’t get a big head.)
Amerie is taken in by two of the coolest social outcasts I’ve ever seen on screen— nonbinary, biracial Darren (an equal parts elegant and sardonic performance by James Majoos) and their bestie, the bubbly autistic lesbian Quinni (Chloe Hayden). This is such a simple thing, and yet one that is often overlooked from a casting perspective— these characters are played (respectively) by a nonbinary person and an autistic person. (Would you look at that—the bare minimum!) In an interview with Refinery29, Hayden captured the importance of this representation: “...media has such a hold on us as to what we believe is real life. So, people see autistic people represented in media played by non-autistic people and they go, ‘That’s what autism is.’”
The show also navigates performative allyship and stereotypes surrounding the perception of autism. Sasha, Quinni’s love interest, is a radical Asian lesbian extremely active in social justice movements and campus organizing. She is taken aback to learn that Quinni is autistic and masking effectively, saying blankly, “I’ve met autistic people before.” Throughout the show, Quinni is forced to set boundaries to assert her independence and protect her emotional safety, as both Sasha and their peers nearly parent her in their misguided attempts to protect her. Hayden weighed in on this as well, sharing that she requested this interaction be featured in the show as it is a universal experience for autistic folks. “I don’t know a single autistic person who hasn’t had someone say to them, 'But you don’t look autistic'.”
Through well-paced flashbacks, we begin to understand that something happened to Harper at a music festival that she and Amerie went to over the summer, and that it’s related to the mysterious rift now between them. The divide at school continues, as the surrounding cast take sides and form opinions on who is at fault. And with the help of her new friends, it's up to Amerie to repair her reputation.
Ensemble casts can be hard to write for. There’s an oft-used structure in television writing where you bounce from character to character, ‘giving’ the smaller core characters an episode each to allow writers to further their stories and even out screen time. But the writing for Heartbreak High is fluid and balanced—there’s none of that stilted feeling of “..and now this episode is about Character X. This episode will be alllll about THEM.” The writing is so integrated that you’re keeping up with each story as you go; you never feel lost with a character, or that their arch is out of place and less interesting. You care about each one of them in equal measure. While you wait with bated breath to learn more of Harper’s story, you meet Darren’s separated parents, who regularly misgender them and blunder through basic love and support, or tag along with Quinni for a book launch for her favorite fantasy author.
While Harper (Asher Yasbincek) hooks up with and begins to date Dusty (the almost-too-heartthrobby Josh Heuston), twisting the metaphorical knife in deeper, Amerie finds a love interest of her own in a a bisexual First Nations boy named Malakai (Thomas Weatherall). Weatherall, a Kamilaroi writer and actor, brilliantly portrays a young, good-natured Aboriginal man, new to the school, who is distanced somewhat from his classmates and in the process of untangling his identity. As Aboriginal and Indigenous identities are so frequently tokenized on screen, it is a testament to the authentic and diverse cast of Heartbreak High that his experience assimilating into a middle-class Sydney high school is done in a honest and thoughtful tone. Malakai joins the basketball team and is one of the best players at the school—but struggles to participate in the cishet-normative and problematic locker room conversations that would solidify his place in the popular crowd (or with its ringleader, an unlikeable jerk nicknamed Spider).
Intimacy is something that Heartbreak High does so well. Nearly every character is believable and well rounded—with their lives still being heightened and exciting in the way we’ve come to expect from teen dramas on TV. There’s glitter, crazy queer Mardi Gras parties, and drugs, but also crying in each other's arms and talking about therapy. There are lovely, communicative sex scenes between consenting teenagers that are good.
You see these kids letting down their guards as they face unique challenges; there is so much value in the emotional safety they foster with each other by doing this. They are actively learning both how to care for each other and how to be vulnerable. That is a crucial skill that you learn first in life through friendship and family (and continue to work on throughout your life) and I really appreciated the nuanced, effective ways that Heartbreak High is able to demonstrate this. The moments when they succeed are so endearing. While Harper and Amerie continue to fight towards each other—clearly missing each other desperately but failing to reconnect—you see a shared love and support develop in many other relationships on screen.
The way romance and sex ebbs and flows in Heartbreak High felt very authentic and believable to me. In high school, love is fleeting—and in only eight episodes, I can imagine it's even more so. The writers’ attention to detail in building out the romantic worlds of nearly every character in the core cast is notable. Quinni and Sasha’s relationship is both queer and neurodiverse. Bisexual threesomes unfold. The mysterious campus eshay, Ca$h (Will McDonald), navigates his queerness all while being the campus drug dealer and trying to distance himself from a dangerous gang.
At times I forget to think critically about Heartbreak High because of how much I love these characters and the cast’s portrayal of them. As the season progresses, tension, curiosity, and worry for Harper’s safety build in equal measure as we learn that something is also amiss at home. Yasbincek delivers an expansive performance, emotive, withdrawn, and deeply in pain. Harper’s eyes always want to say so much more than she ever does.
The show is also balanced with moments of lightness. In the fifth episode, Amerie and Malakai go on a date to an arcade. I’ve noticed arcades as a motif in teen dramas, and there is something very vulnerable and sweet in it as a story choice. Arcades are designed for kids, and so going when you’re older and no longer in that designated age range is delicate. There’s a kind of sheepish silliness in the room with you. As a teenager, going on a date to an arcade seems to me like a ‘letting down of your guards’, perhaps even a willingness to share your inner child with your partner. In the world of high school, when it feels like all that matters is growing up as fast as possible, there is real innocence in going to the arcade.
If Heartbreak High makes one thing clear, it’s ACAB. An act of police brutality against a First Nations member ricochets through the school, amplified by social media. Cops are repeatedly brought in to consult on SLTs classes, offering useless and hyper-gendered tactics for safe sex and preventing assault. Towards the end of the season, a frank conversation with a police officer demonstrates just how futile and ineffective law enforcement is when it comes to protecting victims of sexual assault and how, in the eyes of the law, believing victims is not enough. Heartbreak High doesn’t shy away from the devastating futility of being assaulted and trying to do something about it.
Jojo (Chika Ikogwe), the lovable and youthful teacher tasked with teaching SLTs is a shining example of everything we can hope to see in education. She attempts to thoughtfully adapt the dated SLT curriculum to make it more progressive and effective; but her deviation from the standard is not supported by Principal Woodsy, whose focus is only on how the school is perceived. This commentary on core values in education and how administration can lose sight of this while pursuing other benchmarks was not lost on me. When an allegation threatens to cost Jojo her job, Amerie spearheads a massive protest. In support of Jojo, Quinni yells to her, “we want to be your SLTs!”
Heartbreak High is a reboot. The original aired in 1994 and sought to navigate racial differences, sex, love and heartbreak. This adaptation does all that and more, beautifully restructuring what could have been a typical teenage narrative into one infused with politics, gender, sensitivity and vulnerability. These are things that matter to Gen-Z today. The writing escapes the modern day curse of cringey dialogue and virtue signaling and is instead sincere and imperfect.
For these characters, yearning really goes beyond lust or love or romantic desire—and reaches instead toward a profound longing for community, safety, and trust in each other. And I really think that, when navigating the complicated space of adolescence and high school, these are the things that you need more than anything else. Sure, sex and romance are fun, and maybe some drugs and alcohol in moderation (sorry D.A.R.E, but also, ACAB). But ultimately, Heartbreak High is moored in these community-based values.
You can watch Season 1 on Netflix. And great news—Heartbreak High was just officially renewed for a Season 2 last month. I’m ready to enroll!
Love this show!!!
Heartbreak High is SUCH a great show, and this review is spot on! 👏