Full disclosure: I wrote this post on my phone the night before a weekend trip, and now, two weeks later, I’ve forgotten everything about this show except Milo Manheim. Also, this review contains a ton of spoilers for the show.

After spending two days binging this ghost show, I can confidently say that “School Spirits” (currently streaming on Netflix) is “just alright.”

It feels a bit like the show’s creators watched “Twin Peaks” and “Ghosts” and thought, “I can do that.” Then, they set a missing-girl-turned-ghost story in a small-town high school and gave it a grungy look so people wouldn’t confuse it with “Riverdale.”

The story goes something like this:

Pretty Blonde girl Madison Nears goes missing, and with her absence, many secrets in her small town begin to come to light. Meanwhile, Maddie finds herself occupying the spirit plain with a few other quirky teen ghosts. There are a few rules to her predicament:

1. Neither she nor the other ghosts can leave the school grounds.
2. Ghosts can “interact” with objects physically, but it does not impact the real world (yes, this gets confusing).
3. Ghosts cannot interact with the living, except for one notable exception.

So, Maddie finds herself a ghost trapped at her crappy high school, except her situation is slightly different from all the ghost teens because Maddie is special. The crux of the mystery is Maddie does not know how she died. Notably, the police never find her body, and she spends most of the show “missing.” Thus, Maddie spends the entirety of the show trying to unravel the mystery of who killed her. She also has an additional skill: unlike every other ghost before her, she can communicate with her best friend, Simon, but only in certain circumstances.

So Maddie and Simon, as well as Maddie’s other living friends, work to try and solve the mystery of her disappearance. Meanwhile, Maddie also begins to form friendships with some other ghosts, who are all led/counseled by Mr. Martin, a fellow ghost/teacher who wants to help them. The show does not explain why he’s so invested in helping them, just that he is. Mr. Martin claims that by leaving behind their pasts and focusing on their new reality as ghosts, they’ll eventually be able to “cross over.” The other ghost teens talk about a former friend of theirs, Janet, who Mr. Martin helped to cross over, and they hope to one day follow her.

Okay, so let’s get into spoiler territory.

It becomes clear about halfway through the show that many of the characters on this show are deliberately underwritten or are a collection of cliches in a human suit, existing to move the plot forward or halt it when necessary. Even though “School Spirits” is a character-driven story, the characters often act in service of the story, withholding vital pieces of information from each other for no real reason other than to prolong the mystery.

I am not an expert on police investigations, but my alarm bells went off almost immediately after the first episode. Madison Nears has been missing for several days, and the person leading the investigation is the town sheriff. The town sheriff is also the father of Maddie’s cheating boyfriend, Xavier. That was a really obvious conflict of interest, so I wasn’t sure why this man continued to lead the search for Maddie. It’s also worth noting that the police investigation for Maddie takes a suspiciously long amount of time (several weeks, at least, and enough time to establish and abandon multiple red herrings). For example, Maddie’s backpack is found at an abandoned house, yet the story implies that the house is never searched so much as “occasionally revisited for possible clues/storylines.”

If “School Spirits” were trying to make a point about police incompetence or corruption interfering with investigations, that would be an interesting tale worth telling, but that’s not the case here. The show inadvertently paints a picture of a town that is very unconcerned about the possible murder of a teenage girl. This may be my ignorance, but it seems like the sort of case that could even be escalated to FBI involvement, especially in light of all of the random, tragic deaths that have happened in this small town. True crime fans, please tell me how wrong I am.

Okay, so for comparison, in the BBC show “Ghosts,” the main story takes place in a mansion in England that has existed for hundreds of years. So, the ghosts who are stuck at this mansion come from many different time periods, even back to the days of Neanderthals and Black Plague victims, who existed before the mansion was built. The mansion and the land it stands on have a long history, and the different ghosts are proof of that rich history. It all makes sense in context.

In “School Spirits,” there are no less than 16 ghosts at the American school “Split River High,” from the late 1950s to the 2020s. There may be more than 20 if you were to include the many ghost characters with no speaking lines. This means that for every decade at this school, there have been at least one to three deaths. And these deaths were bad. The least gruesome death belongs to Charlie, who died of a peanut allergy in the 90s. The other deaths range from “murdered and possibly SA-ed by a trusted adult” to “crushed by falling stage equipment.” One poor group of ghosts was on a bus to a band competition when they all died in an accident on campus, and now they’re forced to live out purgatory in an eternal band practice. I’m surprised this school doesn’t have a worse reputation, considering how many teenagers have met their grisly ends there.

“School Spirits” is the kind of show that begins to fall apart if you think just a little too much about it. It’s like when you’re watching a movie or show about kids adventuring, and you start to wonder, “Where are their parents?”

In this show, parents do exist, but almost every single adult is either untrustworthy or incompetent, leading to the bulk of the detective work being done by a group of high school seniors. I like “Scooby-Doo” as much as the next person, but it’s a lot less fun to watch when it’s acted out by a group of teen sleuths who seem better suited to get murdered by Freddy Kreuger rather than find their missing friend. The amateur teen detectives are written to speak like adults and can talk circles around their teachers and law enforcement but repeatedly act like they inhaled the stupid gas from “The Cabin in the Woods.” By the last episode, our idiot teen detectives walked into an abandoned home that potentially housed Maddie’s rotting corpse (and the person who killed her), and their plan involved pulling a Fred-Jones-style “Let’s split up, gang.”

If the show could occasionally wink at the camera, then it might be easier to suspend my disbelief, but “School Spirits” takes itself way too seriously to do that. It’s written in such a way as to keep you guessing the solution to the mystery, but then, if you think about it for too long, you realize that the mystery is only unsolved because the writers needed to stretch out the story. And also because every character is incredibly dumb.

For example, even after Maddie is “dead” and her English teacher appears to be a possible suspect in her disappearance/murder, she still refuses to tell Simon about the nature of her relationship with that teacher (nothing too creepy – he feels bad she has an alcoholic parent so he bails her out of a bad situation). This moment is written to illustrate Maddie’s secretive, reticent nature, as she’s a young woman who’s had to shoulder a lot of responsibility. But Maddie aggressively takes advantage of her connection with Simon, forcing him to give up anything unrelated to solving her mystery, so this moment of secrecy makes Maddie seem foolish, delusional about the gravity of her situation, and insensitive to Simon’s pain.

Several characters are offered up as potential bad guys, and “Twin Peaks” -style, they are absolved of Maddie’s disappearance but guilty of other sins. This format works for the first few episodes, but as characters are removed from the list of suspects, problems with the show’s writing become a lot more obvious. And those problems take form in the other ghosts.

The audience is meant to assume that ghosts cannot interact with or harm the living. However, by the second episode, we know that ghosts can interact with the living because Maddie can communicate with Simon. The show doesn’t explain why or how she can do this, and that lack of explanation is like the elephant in the room. I wondered if the writers didn’t care about explaining this plot point, or if they were deliberately keeping it a secret (and the answer is both? I’m still not sure, honestly).

The other obvious clue that something was amiss was the lack of development of Mr. Martin’s character. Mr. Martin is presented as sort of a guidance counselor for all of our dead teenagers, hosting group therapies, giving them homework in the form of writing their obituaries and planning fun events to keep them entertained. He’s a lot like Pat, the Boy Scout Leader from “Ghosts,” except Pat is warm and open, while Mr. Martin is coolly reserved, holding the other teen ghosts at a distance and treating Maddie with suspicion. The teenage ghosts are happy to mindlessly follow Mr. Martin’s leadership, presumably because he’s a confident-looking adult but also because they believe he helped Janet cross over. Mr. Martin loves interfering with everybody else’s business, but we never learn anything about him. He even seems ambivalent about his own crossing over, which is supposed to be all these ghosts actually care about.

Eventually, the writers are unable to put off the story any longer, and we learn what really happened to Maddie.

Maddie, while still alive, somehow overhears Janet and Mr. Martin fighting about something. Janet rushes at Maddie and manages to take over her body, kicking out Maddie’s soul. While Maddie’s soul wanders Split River High, Janet spends all those weeks squatting in abandoned houses and doing… I don’t know, nothing, I guess? Janet buys a bus ticket out of town with a massive bag of money she finds, and it’s unclear why she didn’t do this sooner. Everyone knows Mr. Martin is bad now, but so what? You’re ghosts- what are you going to do to him?

Also, this meant that the day all the teen ghosts thought Janet crossed over, Maddie’s amnesiac self joined their group just a few hours later, and no one found that suspicious. The last person to die before Maddie joined their group was Charlie, who died almost thirty years before the start of the show. And you’re telling me in that 30-year period, not only did none of the long-time ghosts cross over, but no one thought it was weird? No one found Mr. Martin’s behavior a little sketch in all that time he’d been around? No one picked up on the weird relationship between Janet and Mr. Martin, who both died in the same fire and lied about it for over 60 years? No one thought any of this was weird, and then when Maddie showed up so soon after their friend “crossed over,” they were just like, “Huh, what a funny coincidence!”

If, in the first episode, one of the ghosts had said, “Janet just crossed over,” then the show would have been over before it even started. Instead, we get eight episodes of possible killers, misdirection, and a depressing lack of cool ghost effects. I really liked the first few episodes of this show. I thought it was an interesting concept, and there are worse shows to copy than “Twin Peaks.” But by the season finale, I felt irritated with how little the story had moved forward and embarrassed that I had been so invested in the first place.

If there’s a second season, which there will be, then I’m probably not going to watch it. I just hope someone else writes a synopsis I can read online so I don’t waste my time.