JK Rowling has done a lot in recent years to lower the public’s estimation of her professional achievements, but Netflix’s charmless fantasy The School for Good and Evil teaches the object lesson that conjuring a phenomenon on par with Harry Potter isn’t as simple as scribbling on a cocktail napkin.
Novelist Soman Chainani and writer-director Paul Feig – a man doing his darnedest to erase all memory that he once possessed the power to make us laugh – set out to reproduce that generational smash with another tale of misfit teens spirited away to a magical cliffside academy weirdly attached to its flawed organizational system. And going by the bank ledgers, they did it; Chainani’s hexalogy repeatedly topped best-seller lists, brought him fabulous wealth, and got a green light for the film adaptation that certifies a mere popular book as an official Thing. As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.
