‘My Life With the Walter Boys’ again turns young love into a ‘team’ sport

Review by Brian Lowry, CNN

(CNN) — The latest iteration of a genre that has found success on Netflix in the “To All the Boys” movies and Amazon in “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” “My Life With the Walter Boys” is a shamelessly derivative series that sets up an orphaned girl facing a choice between dreamy brothers. “Team Cole” or “Team Alex?” For those prone to choosing sides, this should be right up their alleys.

Poor teenage Jackie (Nikki Rodriguez) loses her family with scant explanation regarding what happened, but the tragedy means that the New York resident with Ivy League ambitions is abruptly shipped off to a ranch in Colorado to live with her mother’s friend Katherine (Sarah Rafferty), Katherine’s husband George (Marc Blucas) and their full house of hormonally preoccupied children.

Almost immediately (because seriously, when the set-up is this obvious, why waste time?), Jackie is thrown together with the tousle-haired girl-magnet Cole (Noah LaLonde), a one-time star quarterback whose leg injury has left him aimless and who insists on calling Jackie “New York” as a nickname; and Alex (Ashby Gentry), his more sensitive brother, whose longing stares at her seem designed to knock the petite new arrival off her feet, assuming Cole’s earthy charms don’t do it first.

Granted, there’s a lot more going on than that in this youthful soap opera, which shares the outdoorsy qualities of “Virgin River” (another unlikely Netflix staple) or “Yellowstone” with the teen-drama aspects of every show that the CW cancelled in its under-new-management makeover. All of which is to say there should be an audience for this 10-episode season, which throws in mini-dramas surrounding the other siblings, various classmates and the parents’ finances as garnishes to what’s clearly intended to be the main event.

Adapted from the novel by Ali Novak by the company behind “The Kissing Both” movies, “My Life With the Walter Boys” only occasionally rises above its simple underpinnings, like when Jackie questions mean-girl Erin (Alisha Newton) about why somebody with her attributes would settle for being Cole’s part-time squeeze, saying guys in New York would die to be with her.

For the most part, though, the series follows a blueprint that’s comfortable in its predictability and calibrated to pluck all the customary notes, at times a little too self-consciously so, not that it’s likely to matter when the casting works, as this mostly does.

“My Life With the Walter Boys” isn’t bashful about wanting to be the next “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” and it probably will be. Because while hanging out with the Walters brood might not be especially original, there are few more tried-and-true formulas than the combination of scenic wide-open spaces and turning young love/romance into a “team” sport.

“My Life With the Walter Boys” premieres December 7 on Netflix.

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