When it comes to microdramas, there are a lot of recognizable actors, and Evan Adams is one of them.
The man plays a lot of young adult roles, and though he’s great at them, sometimes they feel like roles that don’t challenge him — the same role recycled a few times over. His role in Wet Hot Summer with the Boy I Lost is another one of those.
Now, that’s not to say it’s a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a role we know, and that’s very true. It’s also a role he may simply be comfortable in.
It’s the bad guy who finds himself falling for the girl society says he shouldn’t want, and loves her anyway. He’s the best friend, the secret love, and the one everyone lusts after, all at once.
But he could be more.
He definitely could be more.
And I want to be specific about what I mean by that, because “he could do more” is easy to say and vague. Adams’s whole toolkit here is restraint — he’s very good at playing a young man holding something back, which is exactly what this archetype requires and also exactly what caps it. The archetype never asks him to be wrong about anything. Grayson is right, patient, and morally clear from his first scene to his last. There’s no version of this part where Adams gets to be unlikeable, or petty, or genuinely destructive, and those are the things that stretch a performer. He’s spent a stretch of his career being the answer to someone else’s problem. I’d like to see him be the problem.
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The premise
Wet Hot Summer With The Boy I Lost is about “there is a reckless courage in a shy outcast staking her summer on a daring bet, and a deeper beauty in the unexpected neighbor who turns a fake lesson in seduction into an undeniable passion. A coming-of-age romance painted in stolen summer kisses, secret tutoring sessions, and the thrilling realization that the perfect guy was right next door all along.”
A quick word about hair and wardrobe
We’re going to have to have a fast conversation about how verticals skimp on hair and wardrobe.
Given the amount of money vertical dramas make, it’s genuinely hard to understand how productions let this go. Cinematography, set design, clothing and makeup design — all of it matters. So I fail to understand how these productions don’t make sure they’re well rounded.
And it isn’t a vanity complaint, it’s a storytelling one. Wardrobe is a characterization you don’t have to spend dialogue on. In a format built on 60-to-90-second episodes, where you have no room for exposition, costume and hair are the fastest tools available for telling an audience who someone is and how they’re changing. A show about a girl learning to see herself differently should be able to show me that in what she puts on. When the design is generic, the story has to say out loud what it could have simply shown, and in a format this compressed, that’s an expensive waste.
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Skye and the thing I can’t get past
Starring Evan Adams and Shanna Sinow, we’re immediately introduced to Skye. Skye would be considered a nerd, but the drama concentrates not just on that — more on the fact that she’s a virgin.
While announcing virginity and making it a focal point is one of the most normal things in dramas, it’s still something I will never understand.
Virginity isn’t anything to be ashamed of, and it isn’t a bargaining chip. Every single time a vertical makes a big deal of it I have an issue, because I don’t believe it should have that much power in defining anyone. Is it part of who they are? Yes. But it doesn’t make them any more or less desirable.
It’s one thing if you’re asking someone right before you have sex, or if you’re in a committed relationship discussing the possibility. But the whole “I have to have sex because I’m this many years old” storyline is something we need to grow out of. It should not be the central engine for a girl finding her worth.
And watching this, that’s exactly what it felt like they were doing with Skye. Which is such a strange contradiction to build a story on, because the show’s actual thesis — the thing it says over and over through Grayson — is that Skye’s value doesn’t depend on anyone else’s assessment of her. And then the plot is structured around a deadline she set to prove something about her body. The message and the mechanism are pointed in opposite directions. It wants credit for telling girls they’re enough while running on the assumption that they’re not yet.
Why Grayson works anyway
This is part of why I did like the character of Grayson, though — because he’s loved her since they were kids.
He didn’t care how the world saw her. He only cared what he saw in her. And in her, he saw the world.
He reminds her she doesn’t have to live up to everyone’s expectations, and that she doesn’t need to chase the world. What she needs to do is believe in herself. He wants her to see herself the way he does: beautiful, strong, desirable.
And the reason that lands rather than reading as saccharine is that his belief in her predates the version of her everyone else is currently judging. He didn’t decide she was worth something after she got interesting. He decided it when she was the weird kid and he was the chubby one, which means his opinion of her isn’t a compliment — it’s a record. It’s their history. That’s a much more powerful thing to offer someone. He isn’t telling Skye she’s lovely. He’s telling her she always was, and he has receipts.
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Grayson’s own cage
Grayson’s life isn’t easy. His father is a drunk who abused him and is now forcing him to be with someone he doesn’t care about, because they’re broke.
The man basically wants to pimp his son out — make him fake a relationship so the girl’s father will invest in his company. Grayson tries everything he can to be a strong kid, but he’s only 18, and his father controls essentially everything.
Which is the parallel the drama is smart enough to build and not quite smart enough to say out loud. Both of these kids are being told their bodies are currency. Skye has internalized it, and treats her own as something she owes the world by a certain age. Grayson is having it done to him openly, as a business transaction. Same violation, two directions. He recognizes what’s happening to her because it’s happening to him.
That’s the actual reason he keeps insisting she stop chasing people. It isn’t chivalry. He’s watching her volunteer for the thing he’s being forced into, and he can’t stand it.
The reunion
Skye and Grayson hadn’t seen each other for years.
He remembers her as a hero who defended him no matter what. She remembers him as the chubby kid who got bullied and needed protecting. They were best friends.
Time hasn’t changed how much he cares about her, and she has no idea. She’s genuinely confused about why he’s there for her.
And that confusion is the most emotionally accurate thing in the drama. Skye can’t process being cared about because she doesn’t have a category for it. In her own accounting, she was the protector — the one who gave, not received. So when Grayson shows up offering something with no conditions attached, it doesn’t register as affection. It registers as a puzzle. People who’ve spent their lives being useful to others frequently cannot recognize being wanted for themselves.
There’s also a quiet gender inversion here that I liked. She was the one who fought for him. He was the one who needed saving. Neither of them has ever renegotiated those roles, and part of what the summer does is let them both be the other thing for a while.
The coaching arrangement
But he’s there, and he’s trying to be strong and supportive, even when she wants to be with someone else. He wants to prove to her that she needs to stop chasing people and let them come to her instead.
He tries to explain she’s worth more. And when she won’t listen, he agrees to be her “coach” and teach her about sex.
Again — a storyline I don’t really like, though I know it’s common for YA.
I see stories like this and I hate it, because girls should know they don’t have to “practice,” and shouldn’t feel that pressure at all. I’m fully aware this is a drama. There’s also a responsibility to be, well, responsible.
And the frustrating part is that the arrangement is dramatically unnecessary here. The tension in this story was already fully loaded — a boy being sold into a relationship by his father, a girl who can’t see herself, two former best friends who each remember the other as the stronger one. That’s plenty. The tutoring device doesn’t create tension, it just gives the show a reason to stage proximity, which the premise already had. It’s a shortcut past material that was more interesting than the shortcut.
I’d also note that Grayson agreeing to it slightly undercuts him. His entire position is that she shouldn’t have to earn anyone’s attention. Then he participates in a plan whose whole purpose is helping her earn someone else’s. The show doesn’t seem to notice the contradiction, and I wish it had, because a Grayson who felt compromised by his own choice would have been a genuinely great character.
The chemistry question
What makes me look past a lot of moments in this drama is Evan Adams and Shanna Sinow.
They aren’t a pair I would have thought would have chemistry, and yet I do see it. I’m also left wondering what exactly creates it, because the sense that it’s there changes from scene to scene. Some feel awkward and strange. Some you can’t help but believe in.
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And honestly, I’ve decided the inconsistency might be the most interesting thing about the performances, whether or not it was intentional. These are two eighteen-year-olds fumbling through something neither of them has language for. Uneven chemistry is what that actually looks like. The scenes that land are the ones where they stop performing at each other, and the awkward ones are the ones where their characters are also performing — Skye playing at being someone worldlier, Grayson playing at being a coach instead of a boy in love with her.
I’m not going to claim the show engineered that. But the good scenes are good enough that I’d like to see both of them in something with a script that doesn’t work against them.
The verdict
The drama is entertaining at points, and sometimes it’s a lot. I’m choosing instead to focus on the idea that belief must be suspended — and then I’ll step off my soapbox.
Taken for what it is, Wet Hot Summer with the Boy I Lost is a decent YA drama and provides an escape. There’s a genuinely sweet story underneath the devices I’ve spent this whole review complaining about: two kids who knew each other before the world got its hands on them, finding out that the person who saw them clearly was next door the entire time. That part works. That part is why I kept watching.
Cactus remarks included, but you’ll have to watch to find out what that’s about.
