My Life With The Walter Boys Was Renewed For Season 2 (But Does It Deserve It?)

My Life With The Walter Boys could not have created a more dull or uneven love triangle if it tried. Teenager Jackie is faced with the tragic deaths of her parents and older sister, and for inexplicably underdeveloped reasons, must be sent off to live with her mother's best friend states away from Jackie's home in New York City.

The Netflix series tries to play off that Jackie could not live full time with her uncle because he travels a lot for work and she deserves a stable home environment. The pilot episode also states that by the time Jackie arrives in Colorado, it has been six months since her family died. So, where was Jackie living for those six months?

If Jackie was living with her uncle for all that time, then it makes no sense why she had to move at all. However, the catalyst's thin concept sends Jackie toward a house with way too many siblings, which also happens to be a far more unstable environment than she would have had with her uncle. The new frantic lifestyle is due to two of the Walter brothers, Alex and Cole.

My Life With The Walter Boys wants to be a love triangle similar to the likes of Elena, Stefan, and Damon in The Vampire Diaries or Joey, Dawson, and Pacey in Dawson's Creek. Except, it is missing a few key elements.

For one thing, there is absolutely no exciting chemistry between Jackie, Alex, and Cole. For another, none of the characters from My Life With The Walter Boys are nearly likable enough to pull it off on a show that hints at a clearcut winner from the beginning.

My Life With The Walter Boys never gives Alex a real chance at being a true love interest candidate for Jackie, as all of her significant and emotional scenes rest with Cole.

Cole, however, is an awful person with absolutely no redeeming qualities. He is terrible to Jackie, his on-again-off-again girlfriend Erin, his siblings, and his parents. To make it worse, no one ever holds him accountable for his actions and behavior.

Cole slides through life easily as everyone gives him a pass for literally everything he does without a second thought. He gets barely the smallest amount of reprimands, as if anyone acknowledges the true toxicity that Cole exhibits then he could never be considered to be a true romantic interest for anyone, let alone the central protagonist.

While Alex portrays a shy and introverted opposite to his extroverted older brother, it is not enough to really allow Alex to stand out for Jackie. As much as Jackie may like Alex in a platonic manner, it is never convincing enough that she has real romantic feelings for him. It certainly does not help that My Life With The Walter Boys takes every offered opportunity to put Cole in the spotlight.

Not only is that a bad narrative decision, as Cole never shows any character development or any sense of a real character arc, but it also prevents the show from developing the other family members.

There is a mess of kids in this family, and some are barely developed at all, acting as background noise, while their relationships with each other hardly suggest a sense of familiarity, let alone of a real family.

There is no point for most of the younger kids to exist in the first place, as they all tend to come in and out of episodes without leaving a substantial mark. If all they are there to do is portray a far more chaotic lifestyle than Jackie is used to, it fails because My Life With The Walter Boys never actually showed what Jackie's home life with her sister and parents were like.

My Life With The Walter Boys is a series of overused and badly designed tropes that lack any substance or heart in their presentations.

The upcoming second season has a thin cliffhanger to hang on to. But, ultimately, there was not enough heart, excitement, or substance in this story to have earned it another installment.