Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Maxton Hall: The World Between Us’ On Prime Video, About Boarding School Students Who Go From Enemies To An Unlikely Couple

Rich kids versus poor kids. Unlikely romances. Inappropriate relationships. Teenagers drinking, doing drugs and otherwise acting like world-weary adults. They’re all staples of the boarding-school teen drama genre. A new series, based on the popular novel Save Me, takes this setting and brings it to either Germany or the UK. We’re not sure which.

MAXTON HALL: THE WORLD BETWEEN US: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of what seems like a good night; bottles of booze, clothes strewn everywhere, a phone ringing.

The Gist: James Beaufort (Damian Hardung) is the one who had a good night, waking up next to a classmate, Elaine Ellington (Eli Riccardi) that he doesn’t seem to remember sleeping with. As he stumbles out of his spacious mansion, his friends are all sitting by the pool, hooting and hollering. But the revelry is interrupted when James’s sister Lydia (Sonja Weißer) runs up in tears, telling James that a girl named Ruby Bell (Harriet Herbig-Matten) saw something that might ruin her if it gets out.

Ruby is a scholarship student at prestigious Maxton Hall boarding school, where the Beauforts also attend. Because she’s a scholarship student, not one of the rich kids that usually attend the school, she feels she’s invisible. That’s perfect for her, since she wants to lay low, achieve high, and get into Oxford. Four hours prior to Lydia’s teary incident, she’s on the bus to attend school after break, talking to one of her teachers, Graham Sutton (Eidin Jalali), about a recommendation he said he’d give. She’s the head of the event planning committee, where she and her friend Lin Wang (Andrea Guo) are planning a huge welcome event for new students.

Everything gets turned upside down, however, when Ruby runs back to Sutton’s office to give him a piece of paper she forgot, and sees him making out with Lydia Beaufort.

This is what Lydia tearily wants her brother’s help with. James approaches Ruby and offers her money, but she proudly refuses. Again, it’s not like she doesn’t need it; she works and saves money so that she can buy a new chair lift for her disabled father Angus (Martin Neuhaus). But she’s not a person who will be paid off.

She does, however, need to find another faculty member to get a recommendation; she feels that if someone found out about Sutton and Lydia, the letter would be “worthless to me.” She decides to ask Headmaster Lexington (Thomas Douglas). When she approaches him at a big lacrosse match, he tells her that he’ll give her one if the new student reception comes off without a hitch.

James gets pissed when he sees Ruby briefly talking to Alistair Ellington (Justus Riesner) his rival on the lacrosse team, and warns her that instead of paying her off, he’s going to go in a different direction to scare her out of talking about Lydia.

During the welcome party, a group of dancers bust in, start grinding at Ruby and Headmaster Lexington, and being overall disruptive. Lexington calls both Ruby and James, whom was seen paying off the DJ, into his office. If he wants to stay in school and Ruby wants to get her recommendation, the two of them will have to work together to plan the next event.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Maxton Hall: The World Between Us, adapted by Daphne Ferraro from Mona Kasten’s book Save Me, has a bit of a Gossip Girl-meets-Elite vibe.

Our Take: We don’t often suggest that viewers should watch a dubbed version of a foreign-language show over watching in its native language, but in the case of Maxton Hall, it really doesn’t matter if you watch the show in English or its native German. Its setting is fairly unspecific; it could be taking place either in Germany or in the UK, and the names of all the students are surprisingly Anglo. We are of the mind that the show is likely designed to straddle the two cultures, so whichever language you choose to watch the show in, you won’t go wrong.

That ambiguity took us out of the story for awhile, but once we got back into it, it’s a pretty straightforward story. Rich kid and scholarship kid start off hating each other but when they’re thrown together, that hate turns into a passionate spark. All that’s really left after that is whether and if they go public, how everyone around them reacts, how the Beauforts’ money might try to paper over the situation, and how the scandal between Sutton and Lydia will play out.

Sex and Skin: Any sex in the first episode is implied.

Parting Shot: James vows that Ruby won’t order him around and Ruby wants to make sure James doesn’t ruin her chance at Oxford.

Sleeper Star: We want to see a show about Ruby’s uber-confident and bubbly sister Ember, played by Runa Greiner.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Ruby talks to Headmaster Lexington during the lacrosse match, Lin is taking pictures of him for… something or other. One little problem: The lens cap is still on Lin’s camera.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Maxton Hall: The World Between Us is certainly a show for people who enjoy high school romance and boarding school intrigue, but it’s also nothing we haven’t seen before.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.