With Its Unwavering Realism, Everything Now Becomes the Teen Drama We Desperately Needed
Photo Courtesy of Netflix
The teen drama used to be something that we had an abundance of, but with Riverdale and Sex Education now ended, the genre seems to be teetering on a tightrope of uncertainty. While teenage endeavors have still continuously found their way to the small screen in recent years, satisfying representations of young adulthood seem few and far between. A handful of them get released onto Netflix’s platform each year, but with their newest attempt, Everything Now, it seems like they have finally found their footing. It’s no Skins, which was an incredibly raunchy and realistic portrayal of teenage angst, but it’s also no Heartstopper, which is almost devoid of realism in favor of something more saccharine.
Everything Now revolves around Mia (Sophie Wilde), a teenager who, in the first episode, has just left a seven-month inpatient program for eating disorder recovery. She comes home to a welcoming party, accompanied by her father, distant mother, her brother, and well-meaning Grandmother. There, her Grandmother offers her a slice of cake, and it’s then that it becomes clear that for Mia, recovery isn’t as simple as the people around her would like it to be.
Her friends are supportive, but once they begin unloading gossip onto her, Mia realizes that in her seven months away, she has missed a handful of classic teenage experiences. From here, she decides to make a bucket list filled with firsts. When the group go to Mia’s first high school party, she attempts to complete each task in one night, which ultimately ends in failure. Despite being outpatient, Mia feels like she doesn’t have much time left, and to her, this bucket list also serves as a lifeline. After drinking too much at the party while on a concoction of medication, she lands herself in the emergency room, where her friends reassure her that she’s not alone, and with their help she will complete her bucket list. What follows is a heartening portrayal of firsts and failures, tackling pressing topics from bullying to abortion.
While realism and the saccharine can coexist at times, there’s often no in between within recent teen dramas. The honeyed view of teenage existence can work for a certain audience perhaps, but if that is the only representation we have on television, there’s a larger problem at hand. Young people on TV are allowed to have eating disorders like Heartstopper’s Charlie, but these hardships are a tiny sliver of their lives compared to the cutesy relationships they find themselves in. In Everything Now, while Mia’s eating disorder isn’t the defining factor of her life, it’s given more nuance than the former. From Episode 1, the final credits advise viewers to seek out Netflix’s mental health initiative if they feel the need to, from Episode 6 onwards, a trigger warning precedes the events that will unfold.
When the show flashes back to moments when Mia was inpatient, it showcases the realism of the disorder without exploiting the tribulations the disorder brings. In that way, it’s unlike Netflix’s 2017 release To the Bone, which abandoned its themes of struggling through recovery for a romance that aided in the harmful assertion that people with eating disorders need to be saved. In these flashbacks, Mia’s skin is cracked, her nails are overgrown, and she looks like a shell of the person we had previously been introduced to. The show is adamant about not straying away from the harsh realities of anorexia, but does not force you to reckon with triggering visuals where the sole aim is to shock the viewer. The approach it takes is bold, and treats Mia and her disorder with an amount of empathy that is almost staggering for a modern teen drama.