On My Block gives a realistic glimpse into the life of teens living in South Central Los Angeles. Season 2 is set to premiere Friday, March 29, on Netflix.
The “teen experience” has always found a way to grace our television screens. In the ’80s, television shows like The Wonder Years and Growing Pains attempted to connect viewers by showing that, yes, all young adults must go through puberty and experience love and loss for the first time and, yes, it does indeed suck.
In the ’90s, we were introduced to the glitz and glam of teenagers living in Beverly Hills, 90210 and the California Bayside in Saved by the Bell. Zack Morris had a fancy brick phone he could use to create trouble right at his fingertips, and the characters in 90210 had the fancy cars every teen not in that world drooled over.
Each show was different, and popular, in its own right, but the underlining message was clear: upper-middle-class, if not rich, America was, you got it, doing all right. Yes, the characters in these shows would experience a glimpse of what the real world was like. They fell in love and had their hearts broken. They saw a friend break character and become who they were not. And no one can really forget the episode of Saved by the Bell where Jessie became addicted to caffeine pills to keep up with test taking and her singing group. But that was about as deep as it got. I’ll always be a fan of the ’90s and early 2000s teen drama, but the truth of the matter is that those shows were shallow and almost completely devoid of people of color. It was almost as if we couldn’t exist in those worlds, and maybe to the creators of those television shows we didn’t.
Flash forward a few years, and a show like On My Block finally gets a piece of the story right for people of color while still remaining true to the “teen experience” we’ve grown to love to watch. On My Block tells the story of adolescence through the lens of young teens of color living in a lower-middle-class America created to work against them.
Let me take a few steps back. If you haven’t seen On My Block (and honestly, what are you doing with your Netflix subscription if you haven’t?), the show follows four teenagers navigating life and the halls of high school in South-Central Los Angeles. Ruby (Jason Genao), Monse (Sierra Capri), Cesar (Diego Tinoco) and Jamal (Brett Gray) call themselves “the family” because that’s pretty much how they function. The viewer is led to believe that they have been friends since they were small children, and the way they fight and get back together is a testament to that truth.
After leaving for a summer writing camp, Monse returns to find out a member of “the family” and her sort-of-not-really boyfriend, Cesar, has become a member of one of the gangs, the Santos, that run the block where she and her friends live.
Through bizarre, but charming, escapades, the group of friends try everything they can to help Cesar leave the gang. Cesar’s predicament is that he is led to believe joining the Santos is his predestined future. His brother is a leading member of the gang, and he is easily promoted to illegal tasks because of his intelligence and family legacy.
Throughout his daily life, Cesar often has to code switch, going from a cocky, but innocent, teenager to a wise-cracking street kid with a foul mouth to please his brother. His storyline never tires because unlike most shows that exhaust the “do the right thing” narrative, On My Block captures perfectly the turmoil of being who you want to be and who you were told to be.
The same goes for the remaining members of the group. Monse is battling loving one of her closest friends and the absence of a mother she believes never loved her. Jamal is struggling to live up to his father’s football legacy and the definition of masculinity in his household. And Ruby is attempting to figure out what it means to be in love. This love, Olivia (Ronni Hawk), moves into Ruby’s home after her parents are deported. A saddening, yet common, occurence that some people will never have to experience and others live with every day.
The way season 1 ends, it’s clear that the creators and writers of On My Block don’t care if they leave their audience broken, the point is to always tell the truth and get to the heart of what it means to be a teenager in this neighborhood.
With season 2 right around the corner, I can’t help but wonder how they’ll expand on the lives of the group of friends trying to be the best versions of themselves.
