#biranda

1. Cyrus Goodman’s coming out storyline. It figures this would be number one—when the news broke he would be coming out as gay on the show, it attracted a lot of people as well as a lot of controversy. I do applaud Disney for even approaching the topic, as they barely have before. But as I’ve said, many times before, they really dropped the ball on this one. They hardly mention his sexuality and they never actually say the word “gay,” electing to explain it by saying “I like Jonah.” With the show recently and suddenly discontinuing the jyrus crush storyline (with no buildup), it takes away their easy way out to explain Cyrus’s sexuality, and it isn’t entirely unbelievable that they might just pretend the storyline never happened. It does his character—and all the LGBTQ kids (and teens and adults!) watching, hoping for positive representation and a happy ending—a disservice.

2. The jandi storyline. The fact is, Terri Minsky has already stated that jandi is the relationship she wants girls to know they don’t have to be in. It is clearly toxic and uncommunicative, and has ended multiple times already just for them to get back together. It hurts both of them, driving Andi to break off friendships with boys who aren’t Jonah, and driving Jonah to have panic attacks over his abandonment issues and his aversion of labels. They don’t confide in each other and really should try being friends.

3. Speaking of Jonah’s panic attacks, that’s another problem. As someone who experiences panic attacks fairly frequently, I was honestly thrilled when I saw they were doing this storyline. Unfortunately, it has devolved mainly into “Jonah is upset about Andi dumping him and then uses unhelpful coping mechanisms.” The story behind WHY he experiences these attacks has as of now gone untold. Additionally, the episode where Bowie shoehorns Jonah into that performance was… bad. Jonah takes comfort in his music, it’s a HEALTHY coping mechanism, yet Bowie puts it up against his fear of failure/rejection. It didn’t end up happening entirely like I’d feared, but that is an excellent way to ruin a comfort (I can personally attest to it). That’s not something great to show kids.

4. The Bex/Bowie/Miranda love triangle. The triangle itself isn’t the problem, it’s how they’re handling the relationships between Bowie and the girls. Bowie is currently dating Miranda, but we are clearly meant to root for him and Bex since they are Andi’s parents and that’s what Andi wants. Unfortunately, they all constantly argue and are generally unpleasant around each other. In addition, these characters are adults who should know better, but instead the show chooses to highlight the emotional cheating Bowie is doing with Bex. It’s framed as something cute, look at how adorable they are! And, look, nothing against the Bex/Bowie ship. But when Bowie is dating someone else, it’s not cool to show kids what he’s doing. That’s not even getting started on Miranda’s character individually; her entitlement for Morgan to Andi’s space and property made me very uncomfortable.

5. Sloppy writing in general. This one is pretty self-explanatory: there are too many storylines crammed into one episode, character arcs (like Cyrus or Buffy’s arcs are ignored in favor of het ship plots), we go huge spans of time before seeing certain fairly important characters (Amber, TJ, Ham, Walker), multiple-episode story arcs are dismissed and introduced too quickly with not enough explanation (the jyrus crush ending, Buffy moving to Arizona for two months and then coming back, the potential juffy developing), there is no backstory for important characters (does Jonah Beck have parents? Who knows). Season one was amazing, as was the beginning of season two, but the second half of season 2 has been all over the place.