But instead of joining the military or working on her citizen’s loyalty ranking, Sydney’s inner turmoil starts manifesting in more televisually useful ways, such as accidentally inducing a nosebleed in Dina’s terrible jock boyfriend Brad (Richard Ellis) as the unbearable pair snuggle opposite her in the diner. Small wonder, then, that the roiling mass of emotions inside her seeks an outlet. It is, as I believe the young people say, A Lot. She has also become the object of affection for the local nerd, Stanley Barber (Wyatt Oleff), even though the viewer, if not yet Sydney, suspects that her own true affections lie more Dina-wards than anywhere else. And a stubborn outbreak of zits on her thighs. There’s her family’s sudden relocation to a stultifying small town a mother made brutally unsympathetic to her eldest child by grief and having to work endless shifts to survive desertion by her best friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant), for the world of boys and popularity now that “she got her braces taken off and her boobs suddenly arrived”.
Still reeling from her father’s recent suicide (in the basement of their home), Sydney has a lot to grapple with. It is the second television adaptation helmed by Jonathan Entwistle of a Charles Forsman graphic novel – the first was The End of the F***ing World – and their collaboration has once more borne fine fruit.
Sydney Novak (Sophia Lillis, last seen on the small screen as the young Camille Preaker in Sharp Objects and as Nancy Drew unravelling the mystery of a hidden staircase in a cinema near you last year) is the teenager in perennial emotional flux at the heart of I Am Not Okay With This. The latest representative of this angst-ridden, hormone-soaked time is come to Netflix.
I congratulate all who made it through this volatile leg of life’s journey safely. But according to everything I have heard, seen and read about the phenomenon since, it seems to be quite the developmental stage. It was, like Top of the Pops or having butter instead of margarine, very much considered a despicable modern invention designed to encourage self-indulgence and weaken the state. Growing up as I did in a kind of miniature outpost of North Korea established by my mother in early 80s Catford, I wasn’t really allowed an adolescence.
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