| 80 |
Orlando Sentinel Hal Boedeker
Secret Life feels a lot more authentic than many teen dramas. |
| 75 |
New York Post Linda Stasi
The show, like the old "90210" and "The O.C.," looks to be--from its premiere, at any rate--a top-flight series about a group of high school students, most of whom I liked immediately. |
| 70 |
Baltimore Sun David Zurawik
As entertainment, the pilot is a most impressive work of economic and focused storytelling. |
| 67 |
Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
Woodley's performance lifts a well-meaning, rather brave, but ramshackle show a notch. [8 Aug 2008, p.53] |
| 60 |
New York Daily News David Hinckley
Shailene Woodley is terrific as the teen in question. Unfortunately, other parts of the show feel so contrived they border on soap opera parody. |
| 60 |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
It's far more realistic in scope and situations than "Gossip Girl," but there's such an earnestness and one-dimensionality to the characters that they seem a lot less believable. |
| 50 |
TV Guide Matt Roush
A good girl’s surprise pregnancy is a strong premise, but creator Brenda Hampton (7th Heaven) undercuts it by surrounding Amy with an uninspired ensemble of precociously cardboard classmates. |
| 40 |
Los Angeles Times Robert Lloyd
It feels thin, mechanical and confused. |
| 40 |
Variety Brian Lowry
From the tramp to the Christians, everyone but Amy feels more like a type than a genuine character. Although a degree of shorthand is to be forgiven, these characters are caricatures at best as the series careens all over the place. |
| 30 |
Hollywood Reporter Ray Richmond
This new ABC Family effort from Brenda Hampton (“7th Heaven”) works feverishly to make an educational institution look like the equivalent of a Nevada brothel but succeeds mostly in transforming high school to high camp. Were these stereotypes any more simplistic, they’d need to come with their own parental warning label. |
| 30 |
The New York Times Alessandra Stanley
ABC Family means well but could not have done worse. Secret Life doesn’t take the fun out of teenage pregnancy, it takes the fun out of television. |
| 30 |
Time James Poniewozik
Campily depicting high school as a den of sluts and predators, Secret achieves the noble goal of making sex thoroughly unsexy. |
| 30 |
Newsday Verne Gay
The pilot was so uneven that the whole affair nearly veers into "Reefer Madness" territory--the kind of over-the-top cautionary fable that subverts honorable intentions through hysteria or cliche. Despite its pedigree, Teenager doesn't appear to have ever stepped inside a high school, either. |
| 25 |
Chicago Sun-Times Misha Davenport
It's a shallow portrait of youth, and I can't see how Hampton and her team of writers will be able to sustain things over the course of the series if this continues to be the focus. |
| 20 |
Boston Globe Joanna Weiss
Nothing about it feels original or even especially timely, and it certainly doesn't reveal any great secrets about society. |
