13 Reasons Why: 9 Reasons It Ultimately Fails

1. Not Enough Focus Is On Hannah

Who is Hannah Baker? Or rather, who was Hannah Baker? Why did she kill herself?

These are hugely important questions for this series, because it's framed around Hannah's suicide, and yet it doesn't delve too deeply into the answers. The series unfolds as a number of terrible things that happen to her, and in turn the tapes she leaves behind unspool in various ways for those mentioned in them. She is a series of events, both the one doing the action and the one whom they're being done to, but what about Hannah as a real person? What was she like before all of these things started happening? Because she's already dead, we don't get to see that change take place, and thus don't get to full realise how much these events impacted her.

Going further still, the show offers no analysis of her psyche. This reverts back to the previous point, and the glaring lack of conversation around mental health. Was Hannah depressed? Did she suffer from another mental illness? We can speculate, but we don't get to find out the answer; Hannah is instead just a mystery to try and solve, and someone who could've been saved had people been a bit nicer.

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