13 Reasons Why Review

The first season is a mystery in thirteen chapters. Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette) receives a box of cassettes recorded by Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) before she killed herself, one side for each person she blames, and plays them one at a time while the classmates on them panic. Tom McCarthy directed the first two episodes, Langford earned a Golden Globe nomination as Hannah, and Kate Walsh, as her mother, gives the best performance in the series. The device is also the weakness: Mike Hale complained that viewers end up yelling at Clay to play the rest of the tapes.

The finale showed Hannah's death in explicit detail. School psychologists and suicide prevention groups said it broke the guidelines for depicting suicide, a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry associated the release with a rise in youth suicides the following month, and in 2019 Netflix cut the scene.

With the novel used up, the later seasons turned to a courtroom case, a sexual assault scene in the second season finale that many called unnecessary, and a murder mystery in the third, which scored 11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The fourth ended it in 2020. One strong, irresponsible season cannot carry the other three.