In Netflix’s “Boo, Bitch,” Lana Condor goes to a grad party, gets squashed by a moose, and tries to date her high school crush from the afterlife. If only any of it were funny.
Netflix’s newest comedy offering, Boo, Bitch, might be all about ghosts, but it has absolutely no soul. The eight-episode comedy series stars one of the streamer’s biggest homegrown stars, Lana Condor, and seeks to put an ectoplasmic twist on noughties teen-comedy classics. Unfortunately, those references are nothing more than a transparent sheen over a show with a lot of style and not much to say.
Condor plays Erika Vu, a lovable teen who is nonetheless invisible. Desperate to leave their mark before graduation, Erika and her best friend, Gia (Zoe Colletti), decide it’s time to throw away the rule book and start making some wild senior-year memories. Tragically, their plans are cut short by a stray moose that wanders into the road, causing a car accident and squashing Erika under its immense weight in the process. (Moose, bitch!)
One would think that dying before graduation would be a huge bummer, but Erika’s life as a dead person is shockingly...vibrant. People can still see her, and save for a cold spot that follows her everywhere and some Stranger Things-like electrical powers, this “ghost” might as well be human. With some help from the school’s paranormal club, Erika works to preserve her body while she tries to sort out her unfinished business here on Earth. Could it be a date with her longtime crush, Jake C.?!
As one might expect, the world in which all of this unfolds was designed with an exacting, aspirational eye. (Remember Lara Jean Covey’s enviable digs in To All The Boys? I, a fully grown adult who pays taxes, still see that enviable wallpaper mural in my home-design dreams!) Once more, the teens of Boo, Bitch live in Pinterest-worthy nests—immaculate collages of string lights, jewel tones, and carefully-tended plants. Everyone’s dressed like either a Shein model, a music video extra, or a Hot Topic brand representative-slash-paranormal influencer. It’s a frenetic feast for the eyes.
If only someone had paid that much attention to the writing.
Boo, Bitch isn’t shy about name-checking its inspirations; it proudly pins them to its ’90s yin yang sweater sleeve and, in one case at least, directly quotes them. Rather than build on these references, however, it mostly just lets their legacies hang in the ether.
Nerd girls finally embracing their inner party animals before graduation? That sounds a lot like Booksmart. Erika’s social climbing and eventual “was I the new queen bee” moment? Straight out of Mean Girls. And Erika’s “cool” parents, who spend the series offering her and Gia alcohol and helping her sleuth on Jake C. via Instagram, feel like a desperate attempt to recapture the undeniable cool of Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in Easy A.
On a dialogue level, this series practically screams, “How do you do, fellow kids?” Partway through my marathon viewing, I glanced down at my notebook to realize that half my notes were just quotes I’d written down in stunned disbelief—lines like, “It’s not gonna hurt my feelings because I’m on Lexapro,” and “Crazy town, she didn’t even know she was preggo!” (Speaking of which— yeah, there’s also an extended joke in here about a classmate who gave birth in a hot tub at a high school party.)
By the time Gia begs Erika to “take a low-key chance” with her in the premiere, I “low-key” had to pause so that I could stop screaming.
Lana Condor charmed rom-com fans far and wide in Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy, in which she plays a reserved (and, once again, somehow unpopular) high-schooler who develops a huge crush on a jock with a heart of gold. Now, as ever, Condor remains an ineffable screen presence—magnetic at every turn and endlessly convincing, whether she’s playing a nebbish or a stone-cold monster.
Erika’s terrifying shift in attitude—executed with the quickness of a stiletto-heeled pivot—is among Boo, Bitch’s greatest rewards. Still, it’s hard to ignore the reality that this is a 26-year-old adult playing yet another high-schooler. (Condor’s first big To All the Boys follow-up, the Syfy series Deadly Class, found her playing a prep-school assassin-in-training.)
The heartthrob opposite Condor this time around would be tick, tick...BOOM! star Mason Versaw as Jake C., a mop-headed charmer whose chaotic on-again, off-again relationship with the school’s treacherous queen bee, Riley (Aparna Brielle), becomes the nexus of Erika’s wallflower resentments. Versaw seems to be doing something of a Noah Centineo impression—the tight, pursed-lipped smile, the kindly, crinkled eyes, you know the look. He does pull it off, but not well enough to stop a person from wishing he’d been given the space to find his own crush-worthy wavelength. Great grins, though. Beautiful grins.
Mason Versaw as Jake C, Lana Condor as Erika in Boo, Bitch
But Boo, Bitch misses a crucial component: It forgets to actually give viewers a reason to ship Erika and Jake C. Sure, Erika’s gaga over Jake, but we never really see why. What are the sweet, often silly character details that make this romance simmer? Even as Erika pursues Jake, their flirtations are fractured at best and dysfunctional at worst—a parody of romance more than an expression of it.
Next to all of Erika’s other relationships, however, this superficial coquetry fits right in. Her best-friendship with Gia feels cute but nonspecific. Her rivalry with Riley—her bully since freshman year—feels more formulaic than personal. Too often, the character dynamics at play here feel like the idea of what they’re supposed to be—common tropes viewers are meant to accept, rather than lived-in relationships between people.
That might be fine if Boo, Bitch were pure satire. But for all its tonal confusion, this series has too much sincerity to pass as a fully-committed parody—so its relationships should probably feel at least a little real.
Then again, what is Boo, Bitch really trying to be? It’s part idiosyncratic rom-com, part acerbic paean to the power of female friendship, and part teen comedy—and also a parody of all three. It’s a ghost story, but it’s also not a ghost story, and also it’s a riff on ghost stories. It’s everything, and it’s nothing. It probably could have been a fun movie, but instead it’s yet another misguided, drawn-out Netflix series that will come and go without leaving a trace.