{"id":2776,"date":"2025-09-18T06:49:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T06:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/09\/18\/my-life-with-the-walter-boys-season-two-is-completely-useless\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T06:49:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T06:49:11","slug":"my-life-with-the-walter-boys-season-two-is-completely-useless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/09\/18\/my-life-with-the-walter-boys-season-two-is-completely-useless\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018My Life with the Walter Boys\u2019 season two is completely useless"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>I don\u2019t know what I was thinking when I opened Netflix and willingly typed \u201cMy Life with the Walter Boys\u201d into the search bar. After sitting through all ten episodes of needless drama in season one, I didn\u2019t think I would return for round two. But I\u2019m a glutton for punishment and needed to know what happened next, so I came crawling back.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy Life with the Walter Boys\u201d season one is the kind of turn-your-brain-off show that you can watch with friends and a bottle of cheap wine, pointing and laughing at the events unfolding onscreen. In contrast, this season involved a lot less laughter and a lot more screaming into my pillow. And I didn\u2019t have any wine. The series follows Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez, \u201cOn My Block\u201d), a Manhattan teenager who moves to rural Colorado after her family dies in a tragic accident. Jackie is taken in by Katherine Walter (Sarah Rafferty, \u201cSuits\u201d), her mother\u2019s longtime best friend, and her family, which consists of ten sons and one daughter. As Jackie navigates the difficulties of adolescence and the grief of losing her family, she simultaneously struggles with her feelings for two of the Walter brothers: Cole (Noah LaLonde, \u201cDear Camp \u201986\u201d) and Alex (Ashby Gentry, \u201cAre You Afraid of the Dark?\u201d). Jackie initially starts a relationship with Alex, but her feelings for Cole continue to simmer.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Season one ends on a massive cliffhanger: Drunk at his brother\u2019s wedding, Alex tells Jackie he loves her, but she doesn\u2019t say it back. Then, upon discovering that Cole fixed a teacup belonging to her deceased sister \u2014 previously broken by one of the Walter siblings \u2014 Jackie and Cole kiss. Now having cheated on her boyfriend with his older brother, Jackie flees, hopping on a plane and flying back to New York to live with her uncle.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, leaving is the last sound decision Jackie makes in this series. Within the first ten minutes of season two, she\u2019s already back in Colorado, having been convinced by Katherine to return for the upcoming school year. Her relationship with Alex is (naturally) strained, and the pair officially breaks up. But rather than turning her attention to where her heart truly lies, Jackie locks herself in the same love triangle. Despite her obvious feelings for Cole, she gets back with Alex. I was consistently baffled by her ability to make the worst of any given situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-1    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>Throughout the entire season, the plot is trapped in the same vicious cycle. Jackie makes an awful decision that, in real life, would be grounds for going completely no-contact. The other person \u2014 Cole, her best friend Grace (Ellie O\u2019Brien, \u201cAlert: Missing Persons Unit\u201d) or whoever else her latest victim might be \u2014 gets upset and expresses their grievances to her. Then, instead of fixing the original problem, Jackie replies with a small act of kindness that she assumes will make everything better \u2014 before immediately repeating the same terrible behavior that landed her in this situation in the first place. Flawed protagonists may make for good TV, but reheating the same conflict with different garnishes doesn\u2019t make the flavor any better.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the problems don\u2019t just end with Jackie. Some kind of metaphorical black mold has infested the Walter ranch and made all members\u2019 choices equally insane. No, Nathan (Corey Fogelmanis, \u201cGirl Meets World\u201d), cheating on your boyfriend in public is not the power move you thought it was. No, Alex, you don\u2019t have the right to be jealous of your girl best friend seeing another guy while you\u2019ve been pining over Jackie for the past two years. By the end of the season, my favorite characters were the ones with the least amount of screen time simply because they didn\u2019t have the chance to make the same terrible decisions the others did. I can enjoy a show with characters that aren\u2019t the pinnacle of rationality \u2014 I honestly prefer them \u2014 but when these decisions are made for no reason other than stirring the pot, they quickly become frustrating.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That all said, there are still some genuinely emotional moments sprinkled throughout the season, as Jackie continues struggling to cope with the loss of her family from the first season. Rodriguez delivers a genuine, heartfelt performance, and a few scenes even brought tears to my eyes. Sadly, these are spliced between some of the most useless drama I\u2019ve ever seen \u2014 even for a flock of hormonal high schoolers \u2014 which waters down the impact of these otherwise powerful scenes.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And the most frustrating part of it all? The season ends with the protagonists in the <em>exact<\/em> same position as last season. Jackie is back with Alex, but she and Cole have a confrontation that reveals no, she is not, in fact, over him. The finale renders any previous development completely null. When the episode concluded, I nearly launched my laptop into the nearest wall out of sheer rage. I couldn\u2019t believe I dedicated almost 10 hours of my life to this season for nothing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If you haven\u2019t seen the second season of \u201cMy Life with the Walter Boys,\u201d you honestly don\u2019t have to. But if you share my masochistic desire for pointless conflict and secondhand embarrassment, I guess I can\u2019t stop you.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-2    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><em>Senior Arts Editor Morgan Sieradski can be reached at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/tv\/my-life-with-the-walter-boys-and-the-death-of-my-sanity\/mailto:kmsier@umich.edu\">kmsier@umich.edu<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t know what I was thinking when I opened Netflix and willingly typed \u201cMy Life with the Walter Boys\u201d into the search bar. After sitting through all ten episodes of needless drama in season one, I didn\u2019t think I would return for round two. But I\u2019m a glutton for punishment and needed to know [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1484,2940,754,315,2941,2939],"class_list":["post-2776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-boys","tag-completely","tag-life","tag-season","tag-useless","tag-walter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2778,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2776\/revisions\/2778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}