The Best Teen TV Shows on Hulu

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https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/hul...-shows-on-hulu

I had to give up taking notes on Cruel Summer, Freeform’s ‘90s-set teen mystery series, about 2,000 words in. That said, the very density that prompted me to get 2,000 words deep into a meticulous kind of madness before changing course is precisely the thing that turned Cruel Summer into the internet’s latest generation-spanning hit. Truly, from its complex, triple-layered timeline to its compellingly intimate POV-flipping narrative structure to its viscerally accurate mid-’90s details, Cruel Summer is custom-built to be an object of social media obsession.

In the one corner, you have Chiara Aurelia’s Jeanette Turner, who at any given moment is a sweetly awkward 15, or a recently popular 16, or a universally despised 17, and who may or may not be guilty of compounding another girl’s trauma. In the other corner, you have Olivia Holt’s Kate Wallis, who at any given moment is a universally beloved 15, or a freshly traumatized 16, or an acidly angry 17. In between them, you have a gulf of not-knowing regarding a chilling kidnapping and its sprawling consequences—a not-knowing that at any given moment might come from one character’s inherent duplicity, the natural gaps in another’s first-hand knowledge of a situation, or the fundamental unreliability of memory even before intense emotion is involved. There are some truths that are more real for some characters, and less for others; some realities that are more tangible in one moment than they are in the next.

The likelihood that one girl is lying and the other telling the truth hangs over Cruel Summer like a thundercloud, but in giving the audience just one walled-off chunk of each girl’s side of the narrative at a time, the possibility that they’re both telling a trauma story that’s true to them is just as present. In floating the mid-’90s media’s take on Jeanette and Kate to the top of its story over and over again, Cruel Summer adds an important third perspective on the nature of reality, and all the ways in which it can be warped in the name of “truth;” oh, and the needle drops are killer. —Alexis Gunderson