A disclaimer: I’m not the target audience for Teenage Bounty Hunters, the new Netflix original series from showrunner Kathleen Jordan (who wrote last year’s American Princess). That, judging from the outlets to which Jordan has given interviews — Entertainment Weekly, Refinery29 — would be teenage girls, or, more likely, the sorts of college-educated women who consume young adult fiction well into their 20s and 30s. Another disclaimer: Usually, when I dislike a show this much, I don’t watch more than 10 or 15 minutes of it, so when I say this is the worst show I’ve watched in a long time, my judgment is clouded by selection bias. Nevertheless: Teenage Bounty Hunters is the worst show I’ve watched in a long time.
Originally titled Slutty Teenage Bounty Hunters, the show follows the coming-of-age adventures of Blair and Sterling Wesley (Anjelica Bette Fellini and Maddie Phillips) two not-particularly-slutty fraternal twins at an upscale, preppy, and devoutly Christian private school in suburban Atlanta. Mostly, the plot revolves around the Wesleys’ typical teen anxieties: sex, reputation, and how to reconcile the demands of parental and divine authority with the even more compelling demands of the teenage id. We open with Sterling, the more devout of the two sisters, convincing her oafish boyfriend Luke (Spencer House) to violate his religious convictions by sleeping with her, a sin he dutifully commits. Immediately afterward, the show introduces its main conceit: The Wesley twins, distracted by sex gossip, get into a car accident with a bail-skipper, bringing them into contact with Bowser Jenkins (Kadeem Hardison), a grumpy, aging black bounty hunter who’s impressed by the girls’ unexpected skills with firearms. In need of quick cash to repair their father’s damaged pickup truck, the girls convince a reluctant Bowser to take them on as assistants. And voila: A pair of teenage bounty hunters is born.
Unfortunately, the show loses interest in the bounty hunting subplot almost as soon as it begins. What might’ve been an opportunity for some Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style B-movie camp quickly devolves into a halfhearted plot device for bringing the girls into contact with a facsimile of the wider world. This world is heavily populated by stylish and self-confident black women — a brash stripper, a fabulous art student who serially decapitates Confederate statues in the pattern of a penis (which she explains is a “subtle nod to institutional patriarchy”) — who teach the Wesleys drearily fashionable life lessons about social justice, body positivity, and sexual empowerment.
Those lessons come in handy during the meat of the show: the twins’ quest to pursue their awakening desires while navigating the stultifying atmosphere of their religious high school. Jordan has stated in interviews that she wanted to be respectful of Southern Christianity, and while her show mostly refrains from directly mocking its Christian characters — Blair and Sterling, for instance, both take their faith seriously — it commits an arguably worse sin by casting the essence of the religion as a form of feel-good therapy. After revealing to her school prayer group that she’s lost her virginity, Sterling proclaims that “God doesn’t care. I’m a good person, and that’s all that matters, right?” (Moments later, the adult leader of the prayer group confides in Sterling: “I applaud your ability to know yourself, know your desires.”) Few believers would argue that such behavior condemns a teenager to eternal damnation, but there’s something grating in the way that Christian forgiveness is reduced to a Get Out of Jail Free card. If no sin really matters as long as you know you’re good, then there’s no real tension between the desire to sin and the knowledge that you shouldn’t. One almost feels for April, the show’s obnoxious mean girl, who for all her faults at least believes that her faith imposes some real obligations.
These flaws could be forgiven if the show succeeded as a comedy, but it’s painfully, gratingly unfunny. Blair’s first boyfriend, the impressively moronic bad boy Jennings, provides some early comic relief, but after his exit a couple of episodes in we’re left with little besides characters snappily explaining what just happened onscreen — after an obvious seduction, Blair turns to Sterling to say, “Did you see that? I, like, totally seduced him” — and clumsy stereotypes of white Southerners. These include rich, sociopathically violent good ol’ boys who skip bail to drink bourbon at their Confederate-flag-bedecked country club; the girls’ grandfather, who whips out a .44 magnum at an upscale Atlanta restaurant in order to brag about shooting deer in the head, “execution-style”; a woman who reacts to the defacement of a Confederate statue as if she’s just witnessed the murder of a human being; and the members of a Confederate historical society who — surprise! — turn out to be semiliterate felons who grill meat on their pickup’s engine block and expose themselves in public. The girls, standing in for the audience, react with such apercus as: “Don’t they know the South lost the war?”
For satire to work, it has to bear some relation to the reality it is trying to send up. On this score, the failure of Teenage Bounty Hunters is almost total. Jordan told Entertainment Weekly that she “grew up in a very conservative part of Atlanta called Buckhead” where she “didn’t fit in” and that “a lot of the stories and the themes that we explore on the show are based on my own desires and fantasies and how I wish I’d acted at my own Christian preppy high school.” Clearly, she wasn’t a very observant teenager. I also attended a private school in Buckhead: It’s an affluent suburb like any other, where teen sex, drinking, and drug use are perfectly normal. Whichever school she went to, her depiction of it is frankly insane: a boy getting ostracized from his golf team for having premarital sex with his girlfriend? He would’ve been applauded, if the subject had even come up, and at least one of his teammates would’ve been getting slowly hooked on OxyContin.
The show is less a record of authentic experience and more a warning about the ways that the ideologies and social milieus we adopt as adults (Jordan is a liberal and a longtime resident of Los Angeles) can be grafted on to our actual memories, creating retroactive continuity between the person we were and the one that we are today. Jordan is right about one thing: The world she depicts is a fantasy, one in which the ordinary anxieties of adolescence — lots of teenagers don’t fit in — are recast as a struggle between the world’s most predictable heroes (smart young women discovering their sexuality) and its most predictable villains (rich, dimwitted neo-Confederates). Like a dream, which is boring to everyone but the dreamer, she should have kept it to herself.
Park MacDougald is the Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
