The End of the F***ing World

The last mature film I reviewed was The Place Beyond the Pines, and I know I have been on a streak of family friendly stories and loveable characters, so let’s throw in a curve ball to add more variety. Not only is The End of the F***ing World a very nihilistic approach to the world of teenage angst and psychopathy, but it is also the very first television show I will review.

This show has eight episodes in the first season, each being around 20-25 minutes long, and I binged through all eight episodes on Netflix last night. I was blown away by its storytelling; the writers make sure to show two perspectives for every scenario introduced into the conflict. In the first episode, the two protagonists’ differing ideas are juxtaposed against each other with jump cuts and conflicting inner-monologues, but in later episodes, when the two characters begin to change and have a similar mindset, the writers introduce new characters to block their progress as a couple. Instead of relying on the main conflict, the structure of their adventure flows with the development and changes of the teenagers’ world. It expresses the frequent struggles of a young, angst-filled life and explodes it out of proportion to expose its tragedy and ludicrousness. An entire episode is spent on the two protagonists splitting from each other, almost screwing up their lives but saving it at the last moment, and finding each other where they left off at the beginning of the episode. Their actions are spontaneous, their words are vulgar and messy, and their thoughts are uncomfortable and disjointed from their voices. The relationship and reactions of these two teenage characters was surprisingly fresh and accurate compared to the artsy teen-movies adapted from polished books.

A problem I had with this show is the same reason I will continue to remember its characters. Every person in the story is a nihilistic mess. Other than a security man at a store and Gemma Whelan’s ‘good cop,’ everyone had one destructive trait that drowned any acceptance of their redeeming acts. The tone the writers conveyed about the world was jaw-droppingly grim: everyone has a dark side with an agenda. Everyone wants something from the protagonists, who are unwilling to give anything to them, and this struggle is the reoccurring conflict that pushes the two teenagers from bad to worse. The first two episodes were fun and quirky, admittedly I was anxious to see the violence promised, but by the third episode the story ramped into an exponentially growing window showing the underbelly of the common people you see everyday.

I enjoyed several Netflix shows in the past (Mind Hunter, Godless, Ozark), but The End of the F***ing World is definitely the loudest and riskiest story I have seen on television. It holds no punches and gives no Hollywood endings, and stories like that are not made very often for the big screen. I know Netflix is not Disney or Universal, but I give them an equal amount of respect because they have the flexibility to create something new and bold. Disney and Universal are cranking through movies that follow a trend or an adapted series to be safe from the criticizing mass audience, but the writers on Netflix are not hired to play it safe; they are hired to challenge the way their audience sees the world of entertainment, and they have me hooked on what ever it is they are doing next.

Story Rating: 8/10

Character Rating: 9/10