Episode 91: My Life with the Walter Boys S1E1

We're kicking off a new series, and it's Netflix's My Life with the Walter Boys - a chaos tornado of unexplained children, green screen car rides, and production choices that suggest the insurance company had some very strong opinions about open flames. Based on the 2012 YA novel (3.76 on Goodreads, so you know we're in for quality), this is the fish-out-of-water tale of Jackie, a Type-A New York princess whose family dies in an accident that is never explained. Piano falling from a crane? Helicopter crash into the Hudson? Fashion atelier inferno? Since the show doesn't tell us, we're left to speculate.

Jackie gets shipped off to live with the Walters - a Colorado ranching family with eight biological children spanning a 20-year age gap, two cousins whose backstory remains a mystery even after two full seasons, and a casting director who apparently reached into a bowl of people soup and started pulling. The "twins" look nothing alike. The children look nothing like the parents. And presiding over it all is Mark Blucas - son of Blucas, of the ancient Blucas line - poking an unlit grill with a spatula because liability is a thing.

Peak Dumpster Moments:

• The glass of "lemonade" that looks like warm piss
• Mark Blucas grilling on an obviously unlit grill
• The green screen car scenes so tight they can't even show the vehicle from outside
• Grace's mid-episode recap of all the Walter boys, proving Matt Damon right
• The prop snake that's "insanely smaller" when the kid picks it up versus when Jackie held it
• Uncle Richard's Jos A. Bank special with the oversized jacket
• Cole emerging from the pool in slow-mo glory
• The spaghetti dinner where Mark Blucas dumps a colander of noodles that maybe feeds six people into a bowl for thirteen

Production Deep Dive: Filmed entirely in Calgary, Alberta. Zero Colorado. The school looks like "a generic office park in Glendale, right next to the heating refrigeration business." They can't show what sport the boys are watching on TV because the TV is literally behind a wall. The empty ice cream bag prop. The styrofoam container that could never fit in that refrigerator. This is the Temu version of Summer I Turned Pretty.

The Verdict: Four and a half dumpsters. It's generic, it's tropey, the acting is questionable at best, and the casting is baffling. But we've got nine more episodes to go, so we'll see if that needle moves.

Coming Up Next: We're going back to Danielle Steel with Star (1993), starring a young Jenny Garth as a San Francisco singer struggling to achieve stardom. Because apparently you had to pay your dues with a Danielle Steel movie to make it in the '90s.

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