The End of the F***ing World

When you are in your teens and you pretentiously display your status as a supposed outsider, as you have seen in the current audio-visual media, this series will strike you as being very much for you and about you. You will even shed emotional tears at the obviously nonconformist finale. When you are twenty or thirty and stupefied by the self-proclaimed exceptionalism of Netflix and its marketing telling you that everything bearing its stamp is terribly unconventional and bold and outside the norm, you will force yourself to believe that this series is another nail in the coffin of linear television and its formulas. Except it is merely a very cleverly calculated project for the burgeoning youth audience or rather for the eternally immature who do not want to see realistically drawn young protagonists, but rather their genre-defined variations. The comic-book pedigree can be felt in this work a hundred times over, which means egocentric tension and a presumption of grand rebellion and nonconformity, when superficial emo orations are delivered with big-mouthed vulgarities and occasional splashes of blood. Having had its effect on American (not only) indie cinema, the cash cow of the M comic-book rating is trampling quantity TV. As a result, the series is most infuriating by going the way of the expected humanisation of sociopaths and does not live up to the false lure of the first episode, which conversely would have indeed brought forth something new. (13.01.2018)

When I started watching the series, I had no idea what I was getting into. I didn't read the synopsis or the ratings and reviews, so after a couple of Alyssa's lines, I realized my expectations were way off, but I quickly adapted to it. I immensely enjoyed the main characters/antiheroes. The creators managed to keep the story going, and my favorite English humor wasn’t in short supply. I binge-watched all the episodes in three hours, and I wasn’t bored for a single moment. On the contrary, I had a great time and I would like more such series. // After watching the second season, I’m slightly less thrilled, but I still had fun. (16.03.2018)

January event! A teen retro Bonnie and Clyde in a twisted British package. The main character is a 17 year old introverted psychopath with a desire to kill someone, and his girlfriend is a 17 year old nymphomaniac with a very harsh tongue. What a pairing. The series doesn't mince its words with black to sarcastic humour, there are a few twisted scenes, the pace is fast and the tension grows from episode to episode and the finale literally shocks. A great mini-series ride. I'm looking forward to the second season. 90%. (28.01.2018)

Finally a series I find enjoyable in all its aspects. Simple, brutal, a bit depressing. Moreover, the main characters are two young people, with the girl being aggressive, wild and interesting and the guy a total wacko, which tells you everything you need to know. The authors take the catastrophic idea to absurd lengths, but save it by short duration of the individual episodes, so that you’re never bored. So my personal rating is four stars. It’s original, if a bit forgettable series where the main characters go through everything you can imagine and more. Fresh filmmaking like this is just what I need from time to time. Straightforward and fun. (13.12.2019)

Season 1 – 50% – I would like to like the main duo, but I can't. They are so self-centered and consumed by their own negativity that they only destroy everything and hate, break, slander, or despise everyone. And if nothing else, they at least have to act offended. Sometime in the first act, their ridiculous masks fall and the scripts dive headfirst into unpredictability, but I didn't understand this branching (yet simple) narrative scheme until the end. A surprising number of positive points goes to Gemma Whelan in the role of believable Eunice. I'm only curious about the second season because of the unsolvable situation the creators got themselves into. No matter where the story continues, all the power to be found in it according to the satisfied viewers must inevitably be diluted, no matter where the script goes. Season 2 – 60% – There was silence around the continuation for so long and all involved parties answered questions about ongoing filming evasively that I almost thought it was a decent hoax and in reality, a prequel, reimagining, or some other cunning scheme was being planned. Fortunately, that's not the case, and despite the disappointment, I don't hold a grudge against the series this time. I find reconciliation mainly because the eternal pose of hatred, negation, or deliberate "lethality" definitively disappears, but the result definitely does not stand on strong story legs. Whereas interesting twists happened to uninteresting heroes in the first season, this time I surprisingly resonated with the characters' moods while something not necessarily bad, but predictable played out. The creators try to quote genre relatives and wrap the central plot in a sympathetically concise time frame, but again, it lacks a bit of life, not to mention that the amount of space for the newcomer Bonnie is disproportionately large and, I dare say, unnecessary. Again and again, I try to meet this cult halfway, but it stubbornly refuses to speak clearly to me. (16.02.2018)