“I’m James. I’m 17. And I’m pretty sure I’m a psychopath.”
This is the opening line of The End of the F***ing World, a UK series debuting on Netflix tomorrow. Within the first five minutes, we get flashbacks to a nine-year-old James sticking his hand in a deep fryer just to feel something, and abundant evidence that he kills small animals.
The show actually gets much darker from there.
But also, somehow, much more lovable.
The End of the F***ing World, with Charlie Covell adapting the comic by Charles S. Forsman (it premiered in England in the fall; I’ve seen all eight episodes) is a dysfunctional romance, a tender coming-of-age tale, a twisted comedy, and a fugitive thriller all rolled into one: You’re The Worst meets True Romance meets Submarine. It’s your basic “boy meets girl, boy decides to murder girl, girl talks boy into running away with her, girl and boy get into far more trouble than either could have possibly imagined” tale.
You know, that kind of thing.
The boy is James (Alex Lawther, who was the terrified lead of “Shut Up and Dance,” the cyber-blackmail episode from Black Mirror season three). I’ve already explained him — although, like his new partner in crime, he turns out to be a less-than-reliable narrator of his own story. The girl is Alyssa (Jessica Barden, who played a vengeful teen in the final season of Penny Dreadful), who hates her school, her friends, her creepy stepfather, and, especially, her mother for moving on with the creep and new baby twins. Both James and Alyssa are without one of their biological parents, though the explanation for each absence keeps shifting as they travel together, get to know each other, and attract the attention of law-enforcement while they stumble into one bad situation after another.
They are simultaneously mismatched and perfectly matched, these two. James claims to feel nothing, while Alyssa feels everything much too deeply. She thinks she’s found a dark and mysterious boy who’s the perfect accomplice in her plan to get out of this place, while he thinks she’d be interesting to kill as he graduates from animal victims to human ones. They bring out something new from one another, even as they’re pushing each other deeper and deeper into this mess they’ve created.
Are both of them putting on a front? Neither? Exactly how damaged are they, and are they making each other better or worse? These are the tricky question that the creative team and these two superb young actors get to explore across these eight episodes (all hovering around a wonderfully brisk 20 minutes), along with the larger audience question of whether this is ultimately a comedy, a tragedy, or both.
It’s a very UK take on a classic American type of story, appropriately peppered with US pop culture references. Alyssa admits, “If this was a film, we’d probably be American.” James at one point dons a Hawaiian shirt just like the one Christian Slater wore in True Romance, and the soundtrack is filled with mid-20th century American pop and country songs: Alyssa and James dance raucously to Hank Williams, while Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” plays over a particularly violent act.
There’s probably an ironic, air-quoted version of this story, but The End of the F***ing World commits to the bleakness of it all, even as it shows both halves of the couple revealing themselves to be much more — and much less — than either seems at first. That commitment will make it very much an acquired taste, but I devoured the whole thing, and only don’t want more because the season concludes in a place that works much better on every level if it’s treated as a definitive ending rather than the tease for a second season.
That this is a collaboration between Netflix and E4 at least gives me hope that well enough will be left alone here (as opposed to what’s happening with 13 Reasons Why). If Alyssa and James aren’t always truthful about themselves — even to themselves — they’re honest enough about the world around them to see that these eight episodes should be a sad, strange, perfect little entity unto themselves.
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com. He discusses television weekly on the TV Avalanche podcast. His new book, Breaking Bad 101, is on sale now.
https://soundcloud.com/tvavalanche/episode-47-shows-were-looking-forward-to-in-2018