Never Have I Ever’s college acceptances made way for real (good) drama

polygon.com:

If there is one thing Netflix’s Never Have I Ever has always done well, it’s balance the dramatic with the realistic. While overachiever Devi and her friends might get themselves into ridiculous situations, the world around them still functions very realistically, particularly in terms of school.

That might seem boring on paper, but by actually adhering to the way the real world works, Never Have I Everbecomes more relatable — and can actually dig into drama that few high school shows and movies get to. Nowhere is this truer than in this season’s college admissions arc, a plot point that so many coming-of-age stories have flubbed in the same exhausting ways.

[Ed. note: This post contains some slight spoilers for the last season of Never Have I Ever.]

The big thing that separates Never Have I Ever from a lot of other high school shows: Devi knows where she wants to go to college and she’s known where she wants to go to college since she was a little girl, and she is not about to let anyone persuade her that she’s better off following her friends or a boy.

One of the pitfalls of coming-of-age high school stories is that so very often, they fall into the same tired tropes when it comes to college admissions. Usually this means that the main character is torn between following their dreams or going to school with their sweetheart. More egregiously, this means that the main character waits until the last possible minute, because they’re so torn on their dreams and the possibilities for the future, and then they improbably get into a school they should’ve been planning to get into four years ago. (This one’s specifically a callout for the High School Musical 3 plot where Troy Bolton decides to go Berkeley on his graduation