Your New Favourite Teen Drama Is Now On Netflix

What’s Good? Get Even on Netflix

Who It’s Good For: It’s been eight weeks since I recommended something starring teens in this column and almost three months since I recommended a teen show set at a prep school. You know what that’s called? Growth. This show is for anyone like me who has watched almost every other teen show on Netflix and has been desperately awaiting a new one. If you liked the high-stakes hormonal drama of Pretty Little Liars, the class dynamics and rich-kid scandals of Elite, and the whodunnits of both, you’ll love Get Even. 

How Good Is It? Netflix is the home of all of the current best young adult content out there (save for Euphoria on HBO), so it dropping a new teen drama is a highly anticipated event in my world. The fact that Get Even is a BBC production and I’m on that British trip lately with brilliant shows and former “What’s Good” picks like I May Destroy You and Trigonometry, I was all-in based on the trailer alone. It’s a good teaser, but the series is even better. 

Four teen girls from different ends of the social spectrum — the popular one, the outcast, the jock, and the nerd — make up the principal cast of characters, but they aren’t as formulaic as their archetypes would suggest. There’s Kitty (Kim Adis), the overachieving scholarship student who sweats out her anger at the injustices of going to high school at Bannerman, a prestigious prep school. She’s cold, calculating, and ambitious, like Cristina Yang in a pre-Seattle Grace origin story. Margot (Bethany Antonia) is the shy brainiac who can charm boys unwittingly and doesn’t seem to stress much that she’s lacking in the social department. I was obsessed with her immediately.

Rebel with a cause, Bree (Mia McKenna-Bruce), is probably the most underdeveloped character, but her acerbic comebacks and her crush on a fellow classmate are endearing enough to keep us intrigued. And finally, the poor prettiest girl in school, Olivia (Jessica Alexander), is more than just a beautiful face. She’s getting ditched by her boyfriend and seems to be attracted to her best friend. She’s pretending to be a lot of things she’s not (rich and straight mainly) and so the eye-rolling I usually reserve for this trope faded quick. 

Together, our four leads make up DGM (Don’t Get Mad), a secret group of righteous students who enact revenge on the prep school’s villains (a bullying coach, a d-bag student blackmailing their friend) and leave behind a calling card: “Courtesy of DGM.” The rest of the school doesn’t know who DGM is and, since the girls don’t roll in the same circles, no one suspects the four of being Bannerman’s version of the Avengers. When a dead body turns up with their signature signoff left at the scene, the girls have to race to clear their names (even though no one knows who they are… yet) and cover their tracks.

Get Even is a fun, well-paced (the episodes are 30 minutes) thriller that is propped up by its stellar cast. Like all the best teen dramas before it, it’s got a killer tagline. When the girls decide which scum of the school they are going to target next, they stand around in a circle and take turns saying, “I don’t get mad… I get even.” I almost stood up and cheered the first time they did it. These are the vigilante anti-heroines I didn’t know I needed.

Things that are also good: 
• High Fidelity getting unceremoniously cancelled is not good, but the show is, and rewatching it out of spite is very good
• Megan Thee Stallion
• Michelle Obama’s new soothing podcast which is right on time
• The delightful South African rom-com, Seriously Single
• This meme about the embarrassing music we play in our headphones when no one is looking, like the High School Musical soundtrack (just me?)
• Defunding the police