13 Reasons Why prides itself on "starting a conversation," but the only conversation it starts is how not to do mental health awareness. It borders on laughable how blatantly the writers of this show ignored any and all guidelines on how to depict suicide and mental illness in a safe way. This show not only fails to start a productive conversation around mental illness, but it goes out of it's way to misrepresent and oversimplify mental illness to an extremely dangerous extent. Through the entire first season, Hannah is portrayed as a great person who tragically killed herself and left these tapes blaming everybody who ever gave her a dirty look in the hallway for why she did it. The only way that premise could be done well is if it had made a point to say that what Hannah did is horrible, and in fact far worse than the actions of almost any other character in the show. They severely misrepresent suicide and depression, and instead choose to show Hannah killing herself and leaving these tapes as some sort of revenge by suicide, and it's almost framed as a good thing, like she really "showed them" by killing herself, and it's just so poorly done. When somebody makes the decision to end their own life, it's very common for the people who knew them to look back and blame themselves for every little thing they did that might have caused it, but in reality, you can't blame yourself like that, because somebody's own choice to do something like that is never your fault, (with the extreme exception of somebody like Bryce, who did genuinely push her to suicide by sexually assaulting her.) In this show, Hannah kills herself, then spreads around a series of tapes listing 13 people (technically 12,) who "made her" kill herself. Some of the people did some truly horrible things to her, but some of the more minor things that happened to her that she decides were reasons to kill herself include, a boy who stopped writing little notes to her that he used to write, somebody publishing a poem she wrote without her consent, a girl who used to be friends with her not being her friend anymore, and a boy (the protagonist) stopping kissing her and leaving when she screams at him to get out. There's never a moment in the show where they make it clear that nobody is responsible for her suicide because they did something that made her sad, on fact, they on several occasions take Hannah's side on this, and make the point that all these people "killed" Hannah. The absolute mental gymnastics one has to do to come to the conclusion that because somebody stopped leaving her cute little notes, or listened to her when she asked to be left alone, is responsible for her suicide is absolutely absurd, but the writers of the show seem to be content on that being their core message. At it's best, 13 Reasons Why is a pretty basic teen drama with iffy dialogue, decent acting, and a lot of overly dramatic teenagers. At it's worst it's an absolute trainwreck that encourages suicide as a rational option, makes the point that if you ever do something that makes somebody sad and they kill themselves, you're responsible, and absolutely flies in the face of the message they're trying to send. It's nothing more than a series of overly dramatic poorly contrived moments with unnecessarily graphic details that exist solely for shock value. This is the absolute worst written show on Netflix or any other network, and it's appalling that it was ever allowed to be put to screen, let alone given follow up seasons which only exemplify and further the problems present in this first season.
Review of Tape 7, Side A
