Review of I Am Not Okay With This

by Dave B.

​In I Am Not Okay With This (Netflix), high school student, Sydney, is attempting to deal with the suicide of her father while navigating life as a teenager in a small town. Her relatively normal life is thrown into disarray as she discovers that, when her emotions get the better of her, she manifests incredible telekinetic abilities. 

It’s taken me weeks to write this review because I have mixed feelings about I Am Not Okay With This. On the one hand, the show is a fairly typical coming of age story with dark comedy elements. In that respect, it performs well, if not spectacularly. It handles the subject matter of Sydney’s emotional turmoil competently. The show’s performances are good across the board. And with seven, 20-minute episodes, the season has a brisk pace that makes it easy to binge-watch.

On the other hand, I Am Not Okay With This is often boring. Despite Sydney’s powers providing an interesting twist on the genre, the story itself doesn’t feel particularly unique. That leaves viewers waiting for the scenes in which Sydney’s powers manifest themselves, to be surprised about anything. To be honest, this is one of those shows that may have benefitted from more episodes and a longer runtime. That would allow in-depth character development (which the show does well already) with a more comprehensive look at the larger context of what’s going on with Sydney (which the show barely provides at all). The final episode is pretty much the first time that we get a glimpse at a bigger picture to the story and that’s a shame because that’s the aspect of the show that could truly set it apart.

Overall, I Am Not Okay With This…has a lot of potential. But to paraphrase some ancient wisdom, potential just means that you haven’t accomplished anything yet. That’s how I feel about this show. I’m mostly confident that a second season would allow the show to develop into something special, but for the time being, I’m putting I Am Not Okay With This in the same, rare bucket as “Message From the King” (starring Chadwick Boseman): it deserves a decent rating, but not my recommendation.

Rating: 6/10