When a classmate learns that new girl Jackie (Nikki Rodriguez) has recently moved in with the Walter family, she practically squeals with excitement. “You’re like the luckiest girl in this whole school,” she gushes, describing Jackie’s situation as “boy heaven.”
The comment is more than a little tactless, considering Jackie was only taken in by the Walters after losing her entire family to a car accident. But it’s also an accurate diagnosis of the fantasy that Netflix‘s My Life With the Walter Boys is meant to represent, in which prim and pretty Jackie finds herself living among all the most eligible teenage bachelors in town. Alas, dull characters and sluggish pacing put a damper on the daydream before it ever has a chance to properly ignite.
My Life With the Walter Boys
The Bottom Line
A lackluster collection of clichés.
Airdate: Thursday, Dec. 7 (Netflix)
Cast: Nikki Rodriguez, Noah LaLonde, Ashby Gentry, Sarah Rafferty, Marc Blucas, Johnny Link, Zoë Soul, Connor Stanhope, Corey Fogelmanis, Jaylan Evans
Creator: Melanie Halsall, based on the novel by Ali Novak
The single most striking scene of My Life With the Walter Boys comes very early on, when ex-New Yorker Jackie pulls up to the Walters’ Colorado ranch to find Walter boys seemingly sprawled across every surface and spilling out from every doorway. However many of them you’re imagining right now, I can almost guarantee you there’s more: The final sum is seven Walter sons plus two male Walter cousins plus one preadolescent Walter daughter, all under the loving care of orchard farmer George (Marc Blucas) and vet Katherine (Sarah Rafferty). Of those nine Walter boys, six are in high school with Jackie. Of those six, two fall in love with Jackie more or less on sight. Many of the season’s 10 45-minute episodes are dedicated to Jackie hemming and hawing between them.
But the wish fulfillment of Jackie’s dilemma falls flat when neither option actually seems very appealing. My Life With the Walter Boys, adapted by Melanie Halsall from the book by Ali Novak, recognizes the tropes to make the love triangle land, but not how to bring them to life. Cole (Noah LaLonde) is the jerk with the heart of gold (and the Abercrombie-model abs to match). But the ratio of “jerk” to “heart of gold” is off, so he reads most of the time as a garden-variety douchebag who mistreats everyone in his orbit. Likewise, Alex (Ashby Gentry) is the designated nice guy — but he’s saddled with a neediness that seems about to curdle at any moment into toxic self-pity. In any case, both brothers seem far more invested in their lifelong rivalry with each other than their supposedly once-in-a-lifetime chemistry with Jackie.
Indeed, for a romantic drama, My Life With the Walter Boys is frustratingly short on pairings worth rooting for, let alone swooning over. When Nathan (Corey Fogelmanis), the gay Walter Boy, subjects his crush Skylar (Jaylan Evans) to a grand romantic gesture, we’re meant to understand Skylar’s ambivalence as misguided cynicism rather than a clear indication that he’s just not into the dude. Will (Johnny Link), the 24-year-old firstborn Walter Boy, is mired in a subplot in which he consistently neglects and lies to his fiancée, Hayley (Zoë Soul), for the sake of his career, and then acts stunned and hurt when she points out that they’re growing apart. The platonic pairings fare slightly better — the gradual thawing between Jackie and Cole’s on-off girlfriend Erin (Alisha Newton) is one of the season’s more compelling throughlines — but that only made me root for the various Walter Boy Love Interests to come together as one and realize they collectively deserve better.
On some dramas, such bad behavior can be part of the draw; no one is watching Euphoria or Yellowjackets for the unfailing kindness of their leads. But My Life With the Walter Boys barely imbues its characters with memorable quirks, let alone interiorities complex enough to make us care about them in spite of their flaws. This is a problem in the premiere, and it’s a much bigger problem by the finale, at which point it becomes impossible not to notice how two-dimensional all these people seem even after we’ve spent hours upon hours with them.
My Life With the Walter Boys aims for nothing more or less than to deliver cozy familiarity, and on a superficial level it hits that mark passably enough. The rural scenery is pretty, but not so majestic as to feel distant. The interiors are somehow simultaneously relatable and aspirational (how does this family of 12 keep their kitchen so spotless??). The city-girl-in-a-small-town premise puts it right in line with Hallmark holiday fare; the teen love triangle could be ripped from Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty or Netflix’s own To All the Boys franchise. While the characters run into problems here and there — money troubles, college-admissions stress, a health scare — happy endings prevail more often than not. It’s just that I couldn’t feel much in the way of warm fuzzies from a show whose characters so frequently left me cold.
My Life With the Walter Boys takes as one of its guiding principles that “nothing is so broken it can’t be fixed.” A shattered teapot can be glued back together. A frayed relationship can be mended with apologies. Even a life-changing setback can, with courage and love, turn into an opportunity to forge a different path forward. It’s possible, then, that a prospective second season could right the ship — the finale does end with a glimmer of hope that Jackie might finally find something to do besides angst over her overabundance of suitors. But I suspect the true corollary to that mantra should be that some things remain so flimsy, they aren’t worth keeping to begin with.
