Heartbreak High season 2 review: A Frankenstein of better teen shows

“We’re just a bunch of fucked-up kids trying our best,” one of the peppy young pupils of Heartbreak High declares in the Australian teen drama’s sophomore season, which drops April 11 on Netflix. It’s supposed to be a catch-all apology for a whole host of bad behavior and hormonal hijinks that Amerie (Ayesha Madon), Harper (Asher Yasbincek), Darren (James Majoos), Quinni (Chloé Hayden), and the rest of the Hartley High crew get up to in the new episodes, which navigate everything from toxic masculinity to trippy mushrooms to teen pregnancy. Instead, it seems to be a meta-pardon for the entire season, which so often feels like a Frankenstein of better teen shows that have come before it.

The comparisons to fellow YA Netflix titles like Sex Education and Never Have I Ever were widespread and warranted when Heartbreak High—a soft-reboot of the iconic ’90s series of the same name—debuted back in 2022. Refitted for the Zoomer set, the remake traded the gritty vérité of the original soap for the glossy generationalism of more recent hormone-fueled fare like Elite, Everything Now, and Euphoria.

The populace of Hartley High, the lowest ranking school of its suburban Sydney district, is genetically blessed, heavily accessorized, and progressively diverse. (One grumbling character calls the institution a “woke snowflake nightmare.”) But season one grounded all of that streamer-funded glamor with engaging and thoughtful explorations of racial tensions, gender identity, and neurodiversity. The roles of autistic student Quinni and her non-binary BFF Darren were written with their respective performers in mind, and casting Aboriginal actors like Thomas Weatherall (as Malaki) and Sherry-Lee Watson (as Missy) gave extra heft to storylines about prejudice and police brutality against Australia’s First Nations communities.

Season two’s curriculum isn’t without its own fair share of worthy lessons. Though their “SLUTS” sexual literacy class is now a mere elective rather than a mandatory punishment, sexuality is still very much the main subject in Heartbreak High. Flirty Darren and asexual Ca$h (Will McDonald) struggle with their disparate sex drives, while “Puriteen” Zoe (Kartanya Maynard) juggles her celibacy advocacy with her own youthful hormones. Malaki contends with his fluid feelings for both Amerie and the new boy at school (The Fabelmans’ Sam Rechner), and basketball bully Spider (Bryn Chapman Parish) reckons with his erectile dysfunction and his deep-rooted misogyny.

But, like a lower classman trying to impress a pack of seniors at a house party, Heartbreak High season two largely leaves behind the earnest representation and Down Under uniqueness of its freshman season in favor of the preposterous pulp of shows like Riverdale, Pretty Little Liars, and that aforementioned Sam Levinson series. Like its predecessor, the show’s second term unravels a season-long mystery over the course of its eight episodes. (We won’t spoil it here, but the premiere begins with a bang and, unlike the show’s many racy romps, it’s not the good kind.) But the first season’s threats and thrills were (mostly) rooted in relatability, the kind of everyday disasters that often befall your average adolescent: the grief of an unexpected friend break-up, the bashfulness of one’s sexual discoveries (or lack thereof), the trauma of being let down by your parents. In comparison, this year’s dialed-up teen troubles require a full suspension of belief, from the lunatic gym teacher who leads the boy students in an uprising to reclaim their masculinity (the group is, ever-so-subtly, called CUMLORDS), to the “Bird Psycho” that has been menacingly leaving bird corpses, The Godfather-style, at Amerie’s doorstep.

It’s a shame that so much of the second season feels concerned less with authenticity than fulfilling a teen-show algorithm (clunky lines like “Spider’s gone and literally Poké-morphed into a peak incel!” barely feel written by a real human, let alone uttered by one), because there is such potential in the characters’ more textbook coming-of-age antics. With the sweet but complicated queer romance between Darren and Ca$h, James Majoos and Will McDonald remain standouts in the fresh-faced ensemble, and Ayesha Madon is particularly affecting as Amerie wrestles with her reproductive health in the season’s back-half. We wish Heartbreak High season two had as much confidence in its kids as we do.

“When we were teenagers we got our own Heartbreak High, and what we’re doing here is giving this generation their own show,” the reboot’s writer-creator Hannah Carroll Chapman told The Guardian ahead of the first season. And while, yes, the Netflix remake succeeds in its vibrant Gen-Z makeover, it’s too well-studied in the teen-drama genre to wholly come into its own. So much of adolescence is about forming one’s own identity, and we’re still waiting for Heartbreak High to find itself.

Heartbreak High season two premieres April 11 on Netflix