By Elizabeth Prata
Watch or skip?
SKIP
My Life with the Walter Boys is a Netflix television series based on Ali Novak’s 2014 novel of the same name. The premise is that high school sophomore Jackie Howard, who attends an expensive NYC prep school and is on the track to Princeton, is informed of a tragedy that killed her parents and older sister. According to an old will that had not been updated, Jackie is to go live with her mom’s best friend and her husband on a remote ranch in rural Colorado. The will was drafted when mom’s friend had 3 boys, but they now have 9 boys and a girl. Several of the boys are Jackie’s age.
As I watched episode 1, I noticed that the acting is good, and the production values were also good. The scenery is gorgeous. I could overlook the implausibility that Jackie’s wealthy and famous parents had failed to do something something as important as keep up their will regarding their children. The show needs a premise, OK fine.
As episode 2 went on, several things began to trouble me. The plot was setting up a love triangle between 2 of the oldest boys and Jackie. This is problematic. Firstly, the girl is grieving the loss of her entire family and her only known way of life. Even her desired future is at risk because her Colorado High School does not offer the necessary Advanced Placement courses she needs to keep up her GPA for an Ivy League school such as Princeton. Her grief needs to be dealt with.
However the guardian dad is too busy dealing with imminent bankruptcy of his ranch, the parasite invasion ruining his orchard, and the veterinarian mom is always busy also. They are depicted as caring, but not deeply involved and thus, unaware.
Full disclosure: I abandoned this series halfway through episode 3. There are ten episodes. So maybe the parents clue in later. I don’t know. I don’t care.
Secondly, setting up a premise of the character’s tension/problem being a love triangle is nauseating. The guardian parents and the elder brothers constantly reassure Jackie she’s “part of the family now.” Thus, any love triangle among them all living under the same roof has an incestuous tinge to it.
Oh but that’s not all that bothered me.
The actual ethnic make-up of Colorado is as follows, according to the US Census:
| White alone, percent | 86.2% |
| Black or African American alone, percent(a) | 4.7% |
| American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent(a) | 1.7% |
| Asian alone, percent(a) | 3.8% |
However, the tv show forced a diversity into every scene with numerous characters of Hispanic, Indian, and Asian origin. The population looked more like New York City than rural Colorado. I am not against other ethnicities. Not at all. I am all for a melting pot. But if you’re going to set the story in a rural, mostly white area, but then force an ethic diversity that doesn’t exist in real life, it’s jarring. It’s woke. And it’s not believable.
If you desire to purposely show many ethnicities, set the show in San Antonio, or the state of Washington or outside Vancouver. There are options. (The show is actually filmed in Calgary, Canada).
Below, the High School counselor meets a new substitute, who apparently is of Pakistani/Nepalese/Indian ethnicity. Sure. In Colorado.
And that’s another problem, the counselor appears in every scene in which I saw her, wearing low cut dresses or blouses like she is below. In a High School? No. Boys of that age lust after dryer lint. Flaunting deep cleavage like that in a supposedly clean show is again, unnecessary. It’s also not believable that a High School staff member would dress that way.
And next up we have the homosexuality issue.
One of the Walter boys is secretly gay. I knew it the minute I saw the below scene, where he comes across a guest in their house washing paint off his shirt. The actor was so good in conveying his rush of lust in seeing the fit teen shirtless in the bathroom that I instantly knew. I looked up “Walter boys gay” and there it was, confirmed. Later in the series, the two share a kiss.
If that’s not enough, there is just one other issue I’ll raise. In the series, the second oldest boy, the oldest one living under the roof, and the one Jackie is in the triangle with, is a sexual exploiter. He plays the field, sleeping with girls who throw themselves at him because he supposedly has tons of magnetism the girls call “The Cole Effect.” Cole is in a dating relationship with one particular girl but he sleeps with whoever. So there’s fornication and ‘adultery’.
In one scene, Jackie leaves her room early in the morning to go for a run and bumps into a half dressed girl from school leaving Cole’s bedroom. And the girl is not his girlfriend. Cole is the boy Jackie ultimately chooses… the casual player, the known fornicator who cheats? Where’s the ’empowered grrl self-respect’?
It seems that the focus on wokeness and diversity, and its hyper sexuality especially seen in the world’s desperation for everyone to be gay, eventually finds a home in media like TV. In most new shows, even the ones touted as “family friendly” issues like immodesty, sexual dalliance, and homosexuality will be present. I do not recommend it.
Netflix is notorious for presenting shows then canceling after one season. However, this particular show has already been renewed for season 2. Of course.
Updated later in the day:
I should put in a recommendation for Free Rein on Netflix. It has a similar plot- teen and younger sister visiting grandparents on a rural island off the coast of England, struggle to settle in, make friends, and deal with her parents’ separation from each other. The scenery is gorgeous, the acting is good and the struggles of the teen are realistic without being scary or overdramatic. The series is rated G. I saw the first season so I cannot vouch for succeeding seasons, but to my memory, the show is clean and actually family friendly.
