Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Keep This Between Us’ on Freeform and Hulu, A Documentary About The Grooming Epidemic In American High Schools

Teacher-student relationships are often a pop culture punchline, but for filmmaker Cheryl Nichols, a years-long affair with a high school teacher had serious consequences. In the four-part Freeform docuseries, Keep This Between Us (which is also available on Hulu), Nichols seeks to broadcast just how common, and yet ignored, this predatory dynamic is, and how devastating it can be for young women.

KEEP THIS BETWEEN US: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman in a very tight close-up says with a wavering, tearful voice, “I have something to get over that wasn’t totally my fault. Remembering that I was just this person for years that was constantly focusing their energy on this one person, and trying to give all of their love and support to this one person… I don’t really know what the difference is between having that with a guy who was your teacher in high school and who was much older than you, and having that with, you know, boyfriends your own age, because I didn’t really have that.” That woman is Cheryl Nichols, and this is the story of how she fell in love with her teacher at the age of 16 and has had to reckon with the fact that she was groomed by a much older man for years.

The Gist: Cheryl Nichols is an actor and director with several successful films on her resume, but her road to Hollywood was rocky. As a high school student in Little Elm, Texas, she and her fellow theater kids gravitated to a particularly magnetic theater teacher who the students all loved. That teacher and her husband, who was also a well-liked teacher at the school, would often entertain students in their home but when the husband, who remains unnamed throughout the series, made advances on Cheryl and started sending her inappropriate emails, it started a secret affair that lasted for years.

As an adult, Cheryl reflects on the manipulation and coercive tactics used by that male teacher, and as she digs into her own past, she starts to realize that there are thousands, if not millions of young women who have received the same kind of inappropriate sexual advances and had relationships with older male coaches and teachers. When she finally confronts her own abuser, though he doesn’t agree to participate in the film, he responds to her solely to express how he, too, was a victim in the situation. It’s an infuriating but all too common scenario that Nichols dives into over the course of four episodes with the help of her friends, as well as other victims.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The 2021 documentary film Groomed follows a very similar structure to Keep This Between Us, as the filmmaker, Gwen van de Pas returns to her hometown to reconcile with her own history of sexual abuse and grooming, and explore its pervasiveness.

Our Take: For a lot of us who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, teacher-student relationships were glorified on film, teenage pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were made over into sexual eye candy, and no one batted an eye at the way young women were hyper-sexualized. Keep This Between Us posits that young women in high school are so used to an expectation that they should seek out – and be flattered by – male attention, that a culture of grooming is rampant at schools and in communities all over, but it’s rarely flagged as problematic. This was especially true when Nichols was a student in the late 1990s, but back then we didn’t have the language or the platforms to raise awareness; now that she has a voice to expose this kind of behavior, that’s exactly what Nichols wants to do.

It’s an important issue to be sure, and Nichols’s story makes it clear that without awareness of it, we might all be a little complicit by letting this pattern continue. Unlike so many of the documentaries we all watch these days, there’s less of a true-crime component here, as Nichols’ former teacher was not charged with anything, and hers was not a highly publicized situation that we’ve all heard of. (Instead though, Nichols successfully proves that many adult male groomers are master manipulators who are able to casually play off their actions or even try to convince others that they were the one taken advantage of.) At its core, this is a woman’s story, and the story of so many women like her, and it seeks to raise awareness of an issue that has irreparably changed the course of so many lives, and is never truly acknowledged or addressed.

Sex and Skin: While there are no sexually explicit visuals, there’s plenty of conversation about and descriptions of rape, grooming, and inappropriate relationships between adult men and teenage girls.

Parting Shot: As a victim of grooming, Cheryl Nichols has come to realize that what happened to her has happened to many young girls and women, but it’s rarely talked about. After receiving an email from her much-older former teacher in which he appears to play victim in the situation, Nichols laughs at his audacity, and says, “Everybody’s just betting that I’m the same afraid person that I was back then,” setting the tone for the next three episodes, in which she rounds up more victims who, like her, are ready to speak up about their abuse.

Sleeper Star: Josh Pierson is one of Cheryl’s high school friends who is interviewed in the first episode of the series. He admits that he, too, had been captivated by the teacher that Cheryl had a relationship with, but when Cheryl reveals to him the romantic nature of her relationship, Pierson seems stunned and apologetic toward her for accepting it as normal back then. As an adult, he is outwardly supportive of his friend, but as he reflects on his teenage self, it’s clear that he wishes he could have recognized what was happening and intervened.

Most Pilot-y Line: “He made me feel like I was smart. Like I was mature and I was insightful. And I think that’s also part of the awfulness of these patterns of abuse,” says interviewee Alisson Wood, the author of the book Becoming Lolita, who was seduced by her older English teacher when she was in high school.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Keep This Between Us is an engaging, personal journey for Nichols and as each of her friends and family describe the situation she went through from their own perspectives, it’s horrifying to realize just how acceptable and ubiquitous this kind of grooming from older men toward younger women is. However, this is a potentially triggering and traumatic topic that’s not for everyone, so be warned.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.