Over winter break, my best friend and I spent an entire day sitting on her couch watching My Life With The Walter Boys, a new Netflix show based on a Wattpad book. Plenty of adolescents growing up in the 2010’s read stories on Wattpad and AO3. And don’t act like you didn’t; I’m sure that if I dove deep enough, I could prove you spent some time reading One Direction fanfiction. Or maybe SuperWhoLock. Or even a novel-length story about Harry Potter’s dad and his friends being gay. These sites may be held with scorn, but they’re a space for young authors to write work that gets read by a lot of people and for readers to casually pick up stories without committing to a novel (unless you really like Harry Potter’s dad).
Trouble starts, though, when Wattpad stories are bought by production companies and turned into television series or movie franchises. The After movies, which were based on a Harry Styles fanfiction, and The Kissing Booth franchise, based on an original story from Wattpad, are prime examples of this. The stories themselves may be popular with their intended audience, but they easily fall apart on screen- usually because enough changes aren’t made to the stories even though they were originally written by teenagers. The newest addition to this line of messy, missing-the-mark media based on Wattpad stories is My Life With The Walter Boys.
The show opens with Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez), a go-getter high schooler from Manhattan who the costume department dresses in the worst business casual outfits you’ve ever seen, finding out that her entire family has died in a car crash. That’s the very first scene. Smash cut to her moving into a ranch in Colorado with the Walter family, who she has never met. Mrs. Walter (Sarah Rafferty) was best friends with Jackie’s mom in college and was listed as Jackie’s appointed guardian, even though she has never met Jackie. So not only has Jackie gone through immense trauma, she’s also been uprooted from her life in New York City to move to the middle of nowhere with people she’s never met. To make matters worse, the Walters have ten children, nine of which are boys, and two of which are adopted. That makes Jackie the eleventh kid living in this house.
The show’s biggest weak point is the lack of exposition. The writers jump right into the life of this family and leave the audience to scramble, searching for hints of which son is which and how old any of them are. To help you out, they toss you the bone of giving each son one personality trait to differentiate them from one another. For example, Jordan always wears a beanie and carries a camera everywhere because he’s super into movies and directing but he’s not to be confused with Danny, who is also super into movies and acting. We as a generation are not known for our attention spans, especially in the age of Subway Surfers x Reddit AITA videos on TikTok. So while this show may be for teenagers, it hurts itself by not presenting necessary character and plot information in a clear, concise fashion.
The main plot of the show is a love triangle between Jackie and two of the Walter boys, Cole (Noah LaLonde) and Alex (Ashby Gentry). Cole is the cool, moody brother who lost his chance of a football career and feels misunderstood. Alex is the sweet, albeit cringey, bookworm brother who rides horses and is very jealous of Cole. You might be thinking, “Wow, this sounds a lot like The Summer I Turned Pretty but worse,” and you would be right. There’s even a fist fight between the two brothers at a bonfire party. Both shows also have themes of grief, but in My Life With The Walter Boys, there isn’t much time dedicated to mourning Jackie’s family. Other characters don’t show much empathy toward the teenager, despite the tragedy and trauma she has gone through. One of the worst examples of this is when Cole, drunk and upset that Jackie chose his brother over him, says “I want you to have never come here.” To this, Jackie responds, “Well, I want my family not to have died.” The show’s struggles with tone are glaringly obvious. There is an imbalance between the meaningful moments of the show and the flippant main plotline. Yes, the main character is grieving, but she is not allowed to grieve too much, because she needs to be able to romance the two male leads.Despite my qualms, I enjoyed watching this show, even if I spent a lot of the time cringing. I am of the opinion that “hate watches” are important; not every piece of media has to be critically acclaimed to be enjoyable. It’s fun to sit on your couch with your best friend and complain about the dumb decisions that fictitious teenagers make. Television programs that you love to hate are a harmless guilty pleasure, and My Life With The Walter Boys is no different.
Audra Fitzgerald is a sophomore Advertising, Public Relations and Marketing Communications major who thinks hate watching is the most important form of watching. They can be reached at [email protected]