Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love 101’ On Netflix, A Turkish Teen Dramedy About Students Setting Up The Only Teacher Who Doesn’t Want Them Expelled

As far as teen dramedy plots go, surreptitiously putting people together to see if sparks fly is a pretty standard one. But what if the teens are putting two teachers together because it’s the only thing that’s keeping them from getting expelled? That’s the idea behind the Turkish dramedy Love 101.

LOVE 101: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman walks in a hoodie in the pouring rain along the waterfront in Istanbul. She then sneaks into a dilapidated, condemned house with a dog standing guard.

The Gist: The woman looks like a teenager in her hoodie and Chucks, but when she takes off the hood, we see that she’s in her 30s. She starts to take the covers off the furniture. Then we her her in voice over start talking about what she and her group of friends were like back in high school.

We flash back to 1998, at a prep school in Istanbul. A senior named Osman (Selahattin Paşalı) and his squad of nerds is providing homework answers for a fee to the student body. He even has the guard at the gate on his payroll. But the principal, Necdet (Müfit Kayacan), whom everyone calls “Shit Necdet”, is on his trail and tells him he won’t get away with the cheating; Osman thinks its a “win-win” for everyone.

Three other students generate their own kind of trouble: Kerem (Kubilay Aka) has an anger streak a mile wide, and he gets kicked off the basketball team after he beats up a ref during a game. Eda (Alina Boz) is caught by Necdet making out with a professor, which costs the teacher his job but Eda just chalks up as another way she shook things up. Sinan (Mert Yazicioglu), who lives with his mostly out-of-it grandfather, tends to drink a lot and wander into class late after sleeping one off in the park.

During a debate assembly, all four of them cause various problems, to the point where a melee breaks out in the audience and the school almost burns down. Necdet thinks he has these four malignant students dead to rights, but he still needs a unanimous vote from the board to expel them, and one holdout saves the four of them from being kicked out. After questioning Isik (Ipek Filiz Yazici), the student representative at the meeting, they find out that it was Professor Burcu (Pınar Deniz), a young, idealistic teacher, who stood her ground and kept them from being expelled.

One big problem: Burcu just got approved for a transfer to another school district. And, even though Necdet assures Burcu that he won’t kick the quartet out as soon as she leaves, no one in this group of relative strangers believes that will happen. The four of them meet at Sinan’s dilapidated house on the waterfront to figure out how to keep Burcu at the school. Eda has an epiphany: Find her someone she can settle down with in Istanbul!

But none of them have any idea what it takes to make people fall in love with each other, so they turn to Isik for help, not telling her why they want to match Burcu up with someone. As they search the school for eligible teachers, only one makes the grade: a hunky new basketball coach named Kemal (Kaan Urgancıoğlu), who saunters into the school in slow motion while “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” plays in the background.

Our Take: Love 101 (original title: Aşk 101) is a pretty standard teen dramedy that could have taken place just about anywhere. Most of the 44-minute first episode is spent setting up a premise that didn’t need to much time to set up. While there were moments that were a little funny, it felt like a show that stepped on the gas as far as extremes are concerned, and doesn’t seem to hold a hint of realism.

And, look, that’s not always bad. There are more than enough teen dramas or comedies that are more true-to-life, and they tend to be a little on the boring side. But in the span of this episode, we see fights, a kid with a flask, more than one fight, a principal who thinks nothing of swearing at his students and calling them degrading names, a teacher get fired for groping a student, a student messing with the lights at an assembly, a kid get an amp broken over his head and not go to the hospital, and the school almost burn down. In fact, four of those incidents happen at the same assembly. We were starting to wonder how Shit Necdet keeps his job.

The whole execution is a bit of a stretch. To get the four strangers in position to get expelled the debate assembly had to descend into chaos. Then the four of them had to agree to work together — the excuse Osman gives to the uncaring Sinan about banding together is eye-rollingly silly — then one of them had to come up with the harebrained idea to match up the one teacher who stands between them and expulsion. The gymnastics the writers had to execute to get the story to this point were pretty extreme, and we wonder how the premise can hold over eight episodes.

Sex and Skin: Aside from Eda getting felt up by the teacher, there isn’t much.

Parting Shot: The grown-up version of (we think) Isik writes letters to the rest of the group, and we see each of them receive their copy. We don’t see their faces. One of them is in prison. Then we see the woman stand outside the house and look out onto the water.

Sleeper Star: No one we can spot.

Most Pilot-y Line: The scene where the four of them figure out they don’t know anything about love is a bit of a groaner. “Love is self-interest,” says Eda. The guys talk about one-sided love or love where you give and the other side leaves because they don’t get what they want. It’s a bit of insight into why the four of them are broken in one way or another, but that feels like an overwrought way of giving that insight.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Love 101 has unlikable characters that are being manipulative to get their way. Don’t we see enough of that in real life?

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Love 101 On Netflix