- Network: ABC Family
- Series Premiere Date: Jul 1, 2008
- Season #: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
- Critic Score
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80Secret Life feels a lot more authentic than many teen dramas.
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75The 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.
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70As entertainment, the pilot is a most impressive work of economic and focused storytelling.
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Woodley's performance lifts a well-meaning, rather brave, but ramshackle show a notch. [8 Aug 2008, p.53]
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60Shailene Woodley is terrific as the teen in question. Unfortunately, other parts of the show feel so contrived they border on soap opera parody.
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60It'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.
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50A 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.
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40It feels thin, mechanical and confused.
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40From 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.
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30ABC 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.
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30Campily depicting high school as a den of sluts and predators, Secret achieves the noble goal of making sex thoroughly unsexy.
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30This 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.
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30The 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.
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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.
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20Nothing about it feels original or even especially timely, and it certainly doesn't reveal any great secrets about society.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 32 out of 71
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Mixed: 7 out of 71
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Negative: 32 out of 71
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