Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
Lux, a teen who’s been trudging from one bad foster home to another, lands a new life with her newly discovered birth parents. But will it be a fresh start? That depends on said parents—lazy, beer-happy roustabout Nate Bazile and sweetly erratic radio host Cate Cassidy. It’s an odd nuclear unit, to say the least, and it’s made even more so by the fact that Cate’s engaged to her radio partner, and Nate’s main squeeze seems to be the bar he owns. But, slowly and deliberately, they’re taking steps toward creating some semblance of a family.
Life Unexpected takes something of a right turn from the CW’s stable of sexy dramas such as Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries, which may partly explain why it took so long to get on the air. Repeatedly passed over for far sexier (and now long-cancelled) programs, Life Unexpected went through at least eight name changes before it found a moniker—and a home.
“Our show’s not sexy, and there’s nothing trendy about it,” creator Liz Tigelaar tells the Los Angeles Times. “You could say that’s bad. But it’s a story about growing up, and I think that makes it something else that’s good—universal.”
“Pilot”
Lux is a sharp, snide, know-it-all teen who has suffered through seven dysfunctional foster homes in the Portland area. Now, on the verge of her 16th birthday, she’s looking to legally emancipate herself. But due to a bureaucratic oopsie back when she was born, she needs her birth parents’ signatures to officially cut loose.
She meets them (awkward!) and gets them to sign easily enough. But even so, the judge isn’t inclined to let Lux live on her own just yet. And then she abruptly remands the poor girl into the care of her birth parents—adults Lux literally met the day before.
Life Unexpected has a litany of problems. Lux, we learn, was conceived in the back of a van during her mom’s high school winter formal. It was a night of unfettered irresponsibility—and neither of Lux’s birth parents have grown up much since then: When Cate temporarily breaks up with her fiancé, she and Nate immediately have sex—again. (We see them frantically pull off each other’s clothes and roll and tumble around—mostly in the shadows.)
We see Nate “with” his girlfriend, too, who walks around in a sports bra. It’s visually suggested that he and his buddies smoke marijuana. (“It helps me think,” Nate explains to Lux).
Cate calls marriage a sham (shortly before she gets engaged) and declares that people should never depend on anyone but themselves.
Lux, arguably the most mature of the three, won’t be getting very much good parenting from this couple. Nate’s already set the bar pretty low by coaching Lux to “text friends, post inappropriate pictures of yourself on MySpace, go watch YouTube.”
“You can’t be parents!” Lux tells Cate and Nate. “You need parents!” And that’s probably true. But it’s at this point that some of the show’s plusses start throwing elbows. For all her desire to be out on her own, we see Lux’s longing to belong … to be loved. We see Cate’s desire to do what she can—whatever she can—for the daughter she barely knows. We see that Lux wasn’t a “mistake,” as Cate blushingly suggests at one point, or a one-time fetus to be “taken care of,” as Nate lets slip. We—along with Nate and Cate—see that she’s a gift. Her reappearance in their lives is nothing short of a blessing for all three of them.
We suspect that this show will veer in troubling directions. Cate’s interlude with Nate—mere hours before she unashamedly tells her fiancé she’s ready to try to be worthy of his love—may be especially telling for its future. But even if it goes places we’d rather it didn’t, I’m pretty happy that it’s already gone a few places we’d rather it did. At least in this episode, Life Unexpected acknowledges how precious individuals and families are.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
