The YA craze may be dead at the movies, but the genre may have simply moved where all non-superhero content goes: television. Case in point: Netflix’s forthcoming I Am Not Okay with This, which is both a show for and about young adults and also, incidentally, a superhero show, albeit of the renegade variety.
Chasing her Nancy Drew reboot and last month’s Gretel and Hansel, ubiquitous It breakout star Sophie Lillis plays Sydney, a “boring 17-year-old white girl” who lives in Nowhere, America (Pittsburgh, actually). She never smiles, has a temper, but she also, she discovers, possesses this: telekinetic powers. “It’s probably just puberty,” she muses in voiceover as objects start floating around at her command.
Will young Sydney become a rural Peter Parker, whose problems are more mundane? You can find out in a little over a week, when all seven episodes drop. But it appears the YA genre has evolved into something less soapy, like the Twilights, and more snarky. And it’s got strong pedigree: It shares producers with Stranger Things, and all eight episodes were directed by Jonathan Entwistle, of The End of the F***ing World, as well as the in-the-works Power Rangers reboot. They probably know what they’re doing.
I Am Not Okay with This hits Netflix on February 26.
