3 out of 5

Created by: Megan Trinrud & Nate Trinrud

covers season 1

The title; the premise: it’s a layup; inoffensively unoriginal “cool” material – teen Maddie (Peyton List) is haunting her high school, her spirit locked there (alongside others who’ve died on the grounds) while she solves her murder. A supernatural detective story! Teens from different eras being snarky with one another! None of this necessarily portends averageness, but it’s woven into the show’s m.o. from pretty much the start, building its mystery nearly 100% around narrative convenience and repeatedly relying on personality mismatches to churn out repetitive mini-dramas. From its first chuckle-and-groan set of snarky teen jokes, you accept that this elevator pitch series ain’t gonna do much inventive with that pitch.

Uh, sounds great. But I notice you’re rating it okay still?

And yeah, it is okay. I draw your attention back to the ‘inoffensive’ part of things: because School Spirits is pretty content to bungle along with its tone set-in-stone, there’s no disappointment when you are several eps in and it hasn’t made its characters any deeper or more intelligent, or improved upon its back-of-napkin story outline. And, well, teens kinda act this way. It’s appropriate that they struggle through genericness; not every high school mystery can be Brick. The rather forced twists and turns could’ve been made more twisty and turny, but the basic beats of the story, and the progress Maddie makes towards resolution, work. Plus – and maybe more importantly – we kinda like these kids, even if / when they’re getting in their own way by storming off mid-conversation. List’s mix of drollness and obsessiveness is effected very realistically, and best (living) friends Simon (Kristian Flores) and Nicole (Kiara Pichardo) are spiraling from the tragedy of Maddie’s disappearance – they’re unaware of her being dead – rather realistically as well. The relative shallowness of the script thus allows these actors to fill in the details with their own nuances, and it works to bring humanity in to fill in the story’s gaps, with some of the other ghosts (Milo Manheim, Sarah Yarkin) doing a great job at fleshing out jock / art-nerd stereotypes similarly.

That last bit does get pushed on maybe a bit much over the course of things, making sure we reevaluate everyone, and while I like that approach, the show picks and chooses who it does it with sort of flippantly. The same piecemeal approach is taken with the “logic” of the spirit world, which seems… barely thought out; just enough to let the story play out, and allow for those aforementioned conveniences. It’s the hook the get you in, and to justify that cute title. There’s not much deeper than that, beyond some solid performances and a weekly distraction, but at least the show sets the bar at a tonally achievable level for itself, and it’s easy enough to lean against the bar and watch things play out.