Why Every Lesbian Needs to Watch Everything Sucks!
If you were a teenager in the late 90s and happened to be questioning your sexuality, good luck finding anything on TV that even hinted you weren’t completely alone. That’s why, even though it only lasted one perfect season in 2018, Netflix’s Everything Sucks! hits different—especially for lesbians.
Set in 1996 in the sleepy town of Boring, Oregon, the show follows a group of high-school misfits in the A/V club and the drama club. On paper, it’s a love letter to the 90s: Blockbuster nights, Tamagotchis, Oasis vs. Blur debates, and those chunky school computers that took ten minutes to load anything. But underneath all that glorious nostalgia is one of the sweetest, most realistic lesbian coming-out stories I’ve ever seen on screen.
Let me talk about Kate Messner (played by the incredible Peyton Kennedy). Kate is the principal’s daughter, top of her class, and… completely terrified of what she’s starting to feel for her drama-club friend Emaline (Sydney Sweeney). The way the show handles Kate’s “oh shit, I think I like girls” spiral is painfully relatable. She doesn’t have the language yet. She doesn’t have role models. She literally thinks something is wrong with her. Sound familiar to any 90s/early-2000s lesbians out there?
What makes Everything Sucks! special is that it never treats Kate’s sexuality as a punchline or a tragedy. There’s no “bury your gays” trope, no dramatic hate crime, no after-school-special moral. It’s just… a teenage girl figuring out she’s gay in 1996, the way so many of us actually did—awkwardly, quietly, and with a lot of mixed tapes.
The chemistry between Kate and Emaline is electric even when they’re barely touching. That scene where they slow-dance in the drama room to “Friday I’m in Love”? I had to pause the show because I was grinning like an idiot. And when Kate finally says the words “I think I might be… lesbian” out loud for the first time—alone, in front of a mirror—my heart actually stopped. It’s one of those rare TV moments that feels stolen from real life.
Yes, Emaline is dating one of the A/V boys (Luke, the sweetest himbo on earth), and yes, there’s a love triangle. But the show never makes you hate Emaline for not being “ready” the way Kate is. That messiness is what makes it feel authentic. In 1996, a lot of us dated boys while crushing on our best friends. A lot of us weren’t brave enough to do anything about it. The fact that Everything Sucks! shows both sides—Kate’s quiet certainty and Emaline’s loud confusion—without judging either of them? Revolutionary.
Also, can we talk about how the adults in this show actually act like 90s parents? Kate’s dad (the principal) finds lesbian porn on the family computer (classic 90s panic moment) and his reaction isn’t hatred—it’s fear and confusion because he genuinely loves his daughter and has no idea what to do. It’s messy, it’s imperfect, but it’s real.
The tragedy, of course, is that Netflix canceled it after one season. One. Season. We never got to see Kate fully step into herself, or whether Emaline ever caught up. But honestly? That single season is so perfectly contained, so heartfelt and funny and queer, that it almost feels right. Sometimes one season is all you need to change someone’s life.
If you’re a lesbian who grew up in the 90s or early 2000s, this show will feel like someone reached into your teenage diary and animated it. If you’re a younger queer who never had to live without the internet or Ellen or Heartstopper—this is what it was like before. This is the world we survived.
So yeah, Everything Sucks!? More like Everything Rules. Go watch it. Cry a little. Text your first crush. Thank me later.
(And Netflix, if you’re reading this… season 2 when?? We’re still waiting.)
What did you think of Kate and Emaline’s story? Drop your favorite moment in the comments—let’s scream about this show together.
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