Children should not be incarcerated; Bad Boy is a series about when happens when they are. Created by Hagar Ben-Asher and Ron Leshem (who also created the series on which HBO’s Euphoria is based), Bad Boy follows Dean (Guy Menaster) as a troubled teen whose frustrated mother (Neta Plotnik) decides to call the police on her own son. Soon, Dean finds himself living a grim existence in a juvenile detention facility. Meanwhile, Dean’s naive mother acts as if she has merely sent her son to sleepaway camp.
Bad Boy is indeed harrowing. Dean finds his sense of humour can’t save him in an institution where he’s smaller than the other boys. When Dean witnesses an unspeakable act of brutality on his first day behind bars, his plight gets worse, and he winds up confined to a cell with Zoro (Havtamo Freda), another young man who is not safe around his peers.
But for all of its gritty violence, Bad Boy isn’t actually high art. Admittedly, the show illustrates incarcerating children has terrible consequences. But everyone other than the most evil or clueless among us (like Dean’s oblivious mom) already understands that. Bad Boy gives us disturbing scenes of children attacking each other without the character development of a show like Orange Is The New Black, which demonstrates everyone (even characters we didn’t like) has a meaningful backstory.
If you’re a glutton for watching kids suffer on screen, Bad Boy is for you. If not, I wouldn’t recommend it.
- Genre: Drama
- Release Date: 9/9/2023
- Starring: Daniel Chen, Guy Menaster, Haytamo Freda, Neta Plotnik
- Written by: Amit Cohen, Daniel Amsel, Daniel Chen, Hagar Ben-Asher, Malka, Moshe, Roee Florentin, Ron Leshem
