13 Reasons Why: 9 Reasons It Ultimately Fails

9. Too Long And Repetitive

Starting with the most basic problem with 13 Reasons Why, it's something that'll be familiar to anyone who's watched, well, pretty much any other 13-episode Netflix series: it's just too long.

Netflix produces some excellent TV series, and yet even those that are significantly better than 13 Reasons Why (from Jessica Jones to House of Cards) suffer from issues of bloating and 'Netflix Drift', and it's certainly prevalent once again here.

The show takes a relatively thin book - 288 pages - and stretches it out across 13 episodes. You can see why, obviously, but it falls down when each of those episodes is well over 50 minutes long, and there isn't enough narrative to sustain it.

To that end, the series also gets very repetitive. Such is the nature of its premise, really, because it follows the same formula with each tape, but it means that it starts to sag by the time you're halfway through, and characters hit the same beats over and over again. It's not its biggest flaw, but it is the one that stands well outside of anything to do with its subject matter.