Not gonna lie, millennials born before the new millennium were pretty damn blessed when it came to the TV shows that were around.
We spent our evenings and weekends fawning over James Van Der Beek’s glorious face in Dawson’s Creek and watching Summer and Seth’s epic romance unfold in The O.C.
But while I’m grateful that us 2000s teens had these shows to grow up with, there’s a new series on the block called Looking for Alaska that I can’t help but wish was released back when I was in high school as well.
The entire series just landed exclusively on Stan and after putting all weekend plans aside to binge-watch the entire thing, I’m bloody obsessed.
Looking for Alaska was always destined to be a killer series. Hey, just take a look at the credits.
It’s based on the book of the same name, a sentence which is a siren song to most people but in this case it’s even more so ‘coz it was written by one of the greatest authors of our time, John Green, who brought us Paper Towns, Turtles All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars.
It was adapted by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, two TV legends we all owe our lives to ‘coz they brought us life changing series like The O.C., Gossip Girl, Hart of Dixie, The Carrie Diaries and Dynasty.
With one of the greatest young adult fiction writers and two stellar teen drama series creators at the helm, you just know you’re in for a treat and a half.
Kristine Froseth as title character Alaska
The series features all the tropes any good teen drama should have – an addictive love story, cute boys, girls you wanna emulate, an edge-of-your-seat mystery – and then some.
It follows Miles “Pudge” Halter (Charlie Plummer), a clever teen whose obsession with the last words of famous people leads him to ditch his formal high school and enrol in a picturesque boarding school.
There, he meets and falls in lurve with the alluring Alaska Young (played by The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair star Kristine Froseth).
It sounds all sunshine and lollipops at this point but as the series goes on you’ll see it’s anything but.
After an unexpected and totally shocking tragedy, Miles and his mates are left reeling, struggling to make sense of WTF actually happened.
Charlie Plummer as your new TV boyfriend Miles “Pudge” Halter
Looking for Alaska ticks all the boxes you want a teen drama to tick but in a more woke, 2019 way.
For example, rather than having a brooding bad boi as the lead dude who has nothing to draw on but his brute strength, Pudge is a sweet, quiet character with a brilliant and creative mind.
He and Alaska are immediately drawn to each other, not for the shallow reason that ~they’re both hot~, but because Alaska’s spicy, outgoing personality is a perfect balance to Pudge’s shy and caring nature.
One of my favourite aspects of the series is its feminist presence as Alaska is, herself, a strong-willed feminist.
In the very first episode, she is shown schooling her mate’s BF on how he should treat women which is a lesson that should absolutely be drummed into folks at a young age.
While you’re crushing on Pudge, learning feminist lessons from Alaska and desperately attempting to piece together the mystery in your head, you’ll be graced by the sweet sounds of a carefully curated soundtrack.
Fans of The O.C. will remember the iconic soundtracks that many of us bought on CD (myself included) and you’ll be happy to know that they’ve put as much care and attention into making sure the Looking for Alaska soundtrack complements the story.
“We worked really hard to make sure pretty much all the music that’s in the show is from that year,” Josh Schwartz said at the 2019 Television Critics Association press tour.
“It was pretty fun — I got to pull out some of my O.C. playlists that I had back in the day, music that never made it onto the show. It was like revisiting moments.”
Schwartz and Savage even got “contemporary artists to cover music from that era as well.”
Some interesting trivia about the book that you might wanna be armed with before embarking upon this journey, despite it being v. v. v. popular, it was also rather controversial over in the States.
A school in Kentucky vowed to ban the book following a complaint from a parent who said that it would tempt pupils “to experiment with pornography, sex, drugs, alcohol and profanity”.
In a formal complaint form, the angered parent described the novel as “filth”, while another resident wrote to the local paper to criticise its “mental pornography”.
The parent was outraged that the book used the “‘f’ word” 16 times and the “‘sh’ word” a whopping 27 times *cue gasp*.
Several teachers at the school fought the criticism and insisted that the book should remain in the curriculum.
John Green himself later addressed the controversy, writing:
“I am so grateful to those at Marion County High School who have supported Looking for Alaska and understand that I am not out to corrupt teenagers, and who further understand the importance of reading books critically and thoughtfully as a whole, rather than focusing on individual scenes ripped from their context.”
The fact that conservative parents attempted to ban the story makes it all the more intriguing, doesn’t it?
But also, after watching the series, I totally agree with Green’s argument that the so-called “mental pornography” is merely meant to paint an accurate picture of the experience of growing up.
Clearly the hate campaign didn’t work too well ‘coz the book sold over a million copies following its release in 2005 and became a New York Times best seller, a USA Today best seller, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist and one of TIME Magazine‘s 100 Best Young Adult Novels of All Time.
Green was also awarded the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for the novel, which was also named as one of America’s Best Loved Novels in a national survey conducted by PBS’ The Great American Read initiative.
And following on from the epic success of the novel, the eight-part series is already copping stellar reviews from the critics, with Vulture writing that “it’s the rare adaptation that dismantles the original in order to build something that works better”.
Along with your new crushes Charlie Plummer and Kristine Froseth, the series also stars Denny Love, Jay Lee, Landry Bender, Sofia Vassilieva, Uriah Shelton, and Jordan Connor as well as Ron Cephas Jones (This Is Us) and Timothy Simons (Veep).
The entire series is now streaming only on Stan so do yourselves a favour and get on it ASAP.
