Looking for Alaska Review

"Thomas Edison's last words were "it's very beautiful over there." I don't know what "over there" is, but I believe it's somewhere. And I hope it's beautiful."

          This book was really important to me when I was in middle school, but I wasn't worried about the show 'ruining' that because I don't believe that's a thing. That being said, I am so glad this show was as good as it was.
          It is lovely and deeply empathetic, a feat that I think is realized by its extended runtime over an 8 episode series rather than a two hour movie, coupled with the fact that most of the episodes were directed by women. There are the tropes of the teen drama genre: there is a loser writer boy, an enigmatic girl who shows him what life really is, and a no-nonsense best friend. There's the hierarchy of social classes, the misfits as our heroes, and the eternal struggle for justice within the petty drama of high school. But it's so much more than that because everyone involved believes it to be. To reference the show, it is greater than the sum of its parts. There is care and love involved and deeply threaded throughout, and every character, from the Eagle to lovely Lara Buterskaya, gets the love they deserve.
         The pacing, direction, and acting of this show make it feel so viscerally real. I took a break between the 7th and 8th episodes and the whole time I was thinking, "how can I just be going about my life when such dire things are happening?" before having to remind myself that it was fiction.
         The show is filmed like a memory. The lighting is warm and golden and everything, including the hardest bits, have soft edges. The show takes place in 2005, and it is deeply nostalgic for a time that really isn't that far off. But that's the thing about high school: it is so incredibly set in its time. Every instant is a memory and it all exists in a bubbled vacuum. The moment you leave, it's gone. SO even though 2005 was only 14 years ago, the nostalgic sentiment still works incredibly well.