Boo, Bitch

Falling flat amongst a number of better teen shows, Netflix's Boo, Bitch isn't worth your time.

Go too far in one direction and the audience is left unable to care about any of the characters. Colletti is also terrific as the best friend who just wants to see Erika be happy. So much of the series is derivative. Too many of the jokes fall flat, like the recurring one about Alyssa (Alyssa Jirrels) who didn’t know she was pregnant and gave birth in a hot tub… There’s a surprise twist which I won’t ruin but I also don’t think will be too hard for you to guess (it references another popular film). Showrunners Erin Ehrlichand and Lauren Iungerich count shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, On My Block, and Awkward between them. Go too far in the other direction and the show may end up not being satire at all. You’re gonna live life” go down the side of the screen. And though she’s dead, everyone around her can still see her and talk to her. “We’re finally leaving high school and all we have to show for it is our education,” Gia laments. It is a scary time to be creating television. The CW just canceled Tom Swift. Despite being based on a series of popular novels, there’s not a lot of chatter about Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. How do you reach the target demographic who prefers their entertainment in Tik-Tok sized snippets? No show seems to be creating that much buzz.

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.

Netflix's new limited series 'Boo, Bitch' starring Lana Condor calls back teen movies and TV shows about the supernatural and mean girls.

As a ghost with nothing to lose, Erika becomes the bad bitch she never was when she was alive. While Boo, Bitch is not nearly as dark as Jawbreaker, there is a darkness to it. In many ways, Boo, Bitch feels like a loving callback to other iconic titles and themes. Lana Condor of the To All the Boys… movies stars alongside Zoe Colletti as Erika and Gia (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark), two loner BFFs who decide that they should attempt to put themselves out there so they don't graduate with regrets. When thinking about the themes of teen TV shows and movies, I can't help but think of the final speech that Drew Barrymore makes in Never Been Kissed. Yes, the 1999 movie is problematic (what with its plot about a young reporter undercover as a high schooler who falls for her teacher), but when Josie waits on the pitcher's mound to try to make amends with the man she wronged, she talks about growing up in a way that many of us know to be true. … And there's still that one guy with his mysterious confidence, who seems so perfect in every way—the guy you get up and go to school for in the morning."

Netflix's new series Boo, Bitch ends on a touching moment between Erika and Gia, but when you think about it, it doesn't make sense and is a big plot hole.

This is just the kind of terrifying discovery that pushes Erika to get a wiggle on and discover what that business is. Boo, Bitch relies on the sentiment being charming enough that you don't look too hard for flaws. Through a cloud, or an animal or…" However it does not clear up the incident with the lava lamp five months later. A LAVA LAMP. Are you making the connection? Early on, the girls set about trying to learn the rules of Erika's (which we now know to be Gia's) undead existence.