“My Life With The Walter Boys” Season 1 Review

With “Stranger Things” massively delayed from the strikes, “Bridgerton” season 3 held off until next spring and subscribers outraged over the password sharing crackdown, the obvious choice to get viewers re-engaged with Netflix was to create a new teen love triangle show.

Now, the love triangle can be a powerful narrative shape that works well in shows like the 2009 drama hit “The Vampire Diaries.”

Teen girls venomously argued over whose “team” was better — bad boy Damon, or first love Stefan.

The same goes for the recent Amazon Prime success “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” based on the novels of the same name.

Once again, the options were brooding and misunderstood older brother, Conrad, and his golden retriever-esque younger brother, Jeremiah.

“My Life With The Walter Boys” attempted to join the big leagues and create “teams” of its own, but that doesn’t quite work out when both options are dreadful, and the girl doing the choosing has the personality of a cardboard box.

The show opens with 15-year-old Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez) learning her parents and older sister died in a car accident.

It’s understandable that this tragedy would deeply impact any young girl’s psyche, but viewers don’t see any of the aftermath, and instead face a six-month time jump.

Jackie is moving from her home city of New York to a small town in Colorado, where she’s staying with her mom’s best friend, Katherine Walter (Sarah Rafferty), and her unconventional family.

Keep in mind, this show was adapted from a book originally published on Wattpad.

Jackie enters the blissfully chaotic world of ranch life and meets the infamous brothers, Cole (Noah LaLonde) and Alex (Ashby Gentry.)

But it doesn’t stop with them, there are 10 Walter children altogether.

The older kids get their own storylines later on in the series, but the younger ones serve no purpose besides being in the background for meals.

The oldest Walter brother, Will (Johnny Link), gets an infuriatingly long side plotline about finding his footing financially and taking over a coffee shop turned bar with his fiancé, who ends up leaving him for a while because of his obsession with work.

That probably took up almost a quarter of the show and made no sense to include when the true audience is middle and high school girls who only care about the “hot brothers,” not the economic struggles of a middle-class Colorado couple.

However, the spotlight is most definitely on Jackie for a majority of the series, which is kind of disappointing since she adds absolutely nothing to it.

Jackie lacks everything that makes up a good teen protagonist — humor, wittiness, and most of all, relatability.

She dresses like a middle-aged Vineyard Vines model in the early 2010s, and yet everyone fawns over how “New York” she looks.

It didn’t even help build her “out of place” case, since everyone else in the Colorado high school dresses up as well.

Not a single pair of sweatpants in sight.

It’s clear that the costume designers haven’t stepped foot in a high school in the past decade, and it once again isolates the target audience who can’t find realness in the atmosphere.

Jackie is also hyper-focused on getting into Princeton as a sophomore in high school.

While it’s great to be driven and have aspirations for college, this sets an unrealistic standard for young girls to figure out their futures at 15.

This is no new phenomenon in the media (cough cough, Rory Gilmore), but the Princeton plotline could have been dropped entirely and not changed a thing about Jackie’s nonexistent character.

A character that two boys allegedly fell completely head-over-heels in love with.

Cole Walter is a chiseled blonde with aggressive sideburns for a high schooler, and his whole life fell apart when he injured his leg and got the star football position ripped away.

Obviously, there’s no alternate future for him since football was his entire life, so he gives up trying at school and is just genuinely awful to everyone.

Alex is on the nerdier side, reading “The Fellowship of the Ring” in class and playing video games after school.

He immediately takes a liking to Jackie, and from that moment on becomes what the kids might call a “simp.”

Alex follows her around at school, constantly checks up on her and gushes about her to his best friend, Kiley.

So, what team is everybody on after hearing this?

As the show progresses, Jackie and Cole spend stolen moments together where he shows a softer side of himself, but they’re always interrupted.

After a game of truth or dare goes sideways and Cole almost kisses Jackie, he takes her home for Alex to take care of.

And then Jackie tries to kiss Alex.

At least with “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” both Jeremiah and Conrad have a long history of friendship with Belly that elevates their feelings for her.

Here, it just feels messy and rushed.

Along the way, the Walter family has separate storylines including the family going broke, one of the brothers being diagnosed with epilepsy and two of the brothers fighting over a lead role in the high school Shakespeare play.

The acting all around is just not anywhere near where it needed to be for this show to be considered a success, although the high amount of traffic it’s drawing to Netflix might unfortunately be enough to get a second season.

“My Life With The Walter Boys” ended on a pitiful and sloppy cliffhanger, which just goes along with the rest of the show.

Justice for “Julie and the Phantoms,” which was a teen show like this, but actually had a soul behind it.

Netflix is backing the wrong horses, and it will likely come back to bite them soon.

Rating: 2/5

Kaitlyn Murphy is a second-year majoring in digital and print journalism. To contact her, email kvm6255@psu.edu.