Netflix Review: 13 Reasons Why

After a long wait and huge hype, Netflix finally released its original series 13 Reasons Why on the 31st of March. Based on the book by Jay Asher, the story follows Clay Jensen, an awkward yet forward student at your average American high school in the aftermath of his friend Hannah Baker’s suicide. The whole point of the series and the book is to show the huge emotional burden that high school can have on a teenager. There is so much for students to contend with in these toxic environments – cliques, picking colleges and teaching staff that do not even try to understand. The main group of students, all from different social groups and backgrounds, have extra pressure on them as they have all received a collection of tapes that discusses in details how their actions caused Hannah Baker to kill herself.

Clay is one of the last in the group to receive the tapes but he is the only one who seems to have great difficulty in getting through them. With the aid of his cool and mysterious friend Tony, he slowly and painfully listens through the tapes, all while battling through high school.

At first, it seems like Hannah Baker is a bit of dramatic fantasist but as Clay goes through the tapes, we see her life get more and more difficult and the people around her constantly let her down. She suffers greatly under the culture of ‘slut-shaming’ and general objectification of girls and if attitudes towards women were different, she would have definitely still been alive.

The point of this show is to show that no matter how hard things get, suicide should never be the better option and even if somebody seems to be mentally healthy and happy on the outside, you never truly know what is going on in their life. What is especially hard-hitting in the series is the impact Hannah’s suicide had on her devastated parents who don’t understand why she did what she did.

It may seem cruel of Hannah to have left these tapes for these students, especially those who didn’t really do much to her, but once you reach the end of the tapes, you’ll understand what Hannah hoped to do posthumously.

13 Reasons Why is definitely an important show for any high school student to watch in order to understand that every action, big or small, can have a huge impact on someone else.