- Network: ABC Family
- Series Premiere Date: Jul 1, 2008
Watch Now
Where To Watch
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Secret Life feels a lot more authentic than many teen dramas.
-
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.
-
As entertainment, the pilot is a most impressive work of economic and focused storytelling.
-
Woodley's performance lifts a well-meaning, rather brave, but ramshackle show a notch. [8 Aug 2008, p.53]
-
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.
-
Shailene Woodley is terrific as the teen in question. Unfortunately, other parts of the show feel so contrived they border on soap opera parody.
-
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.
-
It feels thin, mechanical and confused.
-
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.
-
Campily depicting high school as a den of sluts and predators, Secret achieves the noble goal of making sex thoroughly unsexy.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nothing about it feels original or even especially timely, and it certainly doesn't reveal any great secrets about society.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 67 out of 131
-
Mixed: 7 out of 131
-
Negative: 57 out of 131
-
Mar 16, 2011
-
JenniferNJan 4, 2010
-
Nov 25, 2016This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.