My Life with the Walter Boys has been renewed for a second season. The announcement came when some of us didn’t even know that this series existed. For whatever reason, this fiction has been the latest Netflix phenomenon. Its premiere coincides with a new attempt by the platform to be transparent with its audience data. However, every time Netflix publishes information of this type, it always receives the same criticism: it is unaudited data and such completeness and accuracy indicate that the company has much more, much more relevant information. And he keeps it. And they refer us to the Netflix Top 10 page, whose reliability is whatever you want to give it. According to Netflix Top 10, My Life with the Walter Boys is the most watched series in the world and in Spain. And in Costa Rica. And in Iceland.
I won’t be the one to question the success of this series. Yes, its quality, of course. There is no need to tread very thinly with My Life with the Walter Boys. Only the ugly appearance of it, clearly designed for small screens, draws us back. So many short shots make you dizzy. I suppose Netflix knows that series like this are watched a lot on mobile phones and already orders them with that poor and basic audiovisual language. It has to be that without a doubt.
The plot of My Life with the Walter Boys is not much more elaborate. The story begins when teenager Jackie (Nikki Rodríguez) moves from New York to Colorado, after losing her entire family in a car accident. She will go from enjoying cosmopolitan Manhattan to living in the middle of nowhere with the Walters, a disturbingly extensive family clan. Before knowing where she will sleep in her new house, Jackie already has her first sentimental-sexual dilemma with her brothers-not-siblings. Because why would My Life with the Walter Boys be fussy when Netflix knows from what exact minute a viewer abandons a series if they haven’t been given anything to hold on to. If Jackie is given several Walters to hold on to as soon as possible, it’s harder for the target audience of her series to tune out.
Since this product has clearly been conceived under these types of parameters, it is absurd to try to analyze it in a much more thoughtful way. Even more so if we take into account that My Life with the Walter Boys is the adaptation of a novel that its author, Ali Novak, began writing when she was 15 years old. It’s not that it is a series for fifteen-year-olds, it is that it is a fifteen-year-old series.
In recent years we have been able to see very interesting series by, with and for teenagers. Fictions that know how to attract teenagers without scaring away adults. According to Netflix, My Life with the Walter Boys has attracted millions of viewers. I imagine that most of them are very young and watch it on their cell phones. “Fun”, “light” and “fantasy” are words that are repeated a lot in its positive reviews, so let’s not rule out that Netflix’s next youth phenomenon includes them directly in its title. The algorithm has no mercy. No taste.
