There are times when I can understand exactly what a story is doing and still want to fight the entire institution at the center of it. That’s where I landed with ReelShort’s The School for Bad Boys. I understand why Maplewood Reform Academy exists within this story. Put young people with complicated histories in a place they can’t easily escape, give the people in charge far too much power, and you have a setting built for drama.
But understanding its purpose doesn’t make me hate it any less.
Maplewood is hell. Let’s establish that immediately. It isn’t a misunderstood school offering tough love. It’s a place where the sons of the elite are sent to stay out of prison and out of their families’ headlines, with their freedom dependent on following rules designed to control them. And when one of those rules explicitly prohibits homosexual activity, the message is clear: these boys can stay out of prison as long as they deny parts of themselves.
That’s not rehabilitation. That’s cruelty.
What makes The School for Bad Boys, led by Declan Clifford and Greg Duffy, worth watching isn’t the institution or its attempts to justify itself. It’s the connection between Cody Calloway and Beckett Hayes, the friendships that offer some protection within those walls, and the question of who you can become when everyone around you insists on deciding that for you.
Because love is love. Maplewood is the problem.
Cody Doesn’t Need to Be Fixed
One of the most important distinctions in this story is that Cody’s sexuality isn’t something he needs to work through or overcome. Other people’s response to it is.
Cody ends up at Maplewood after redirecting his father’s campaign donations to LGBTQ+ organizations following his father’s vote against legislation that would help the community. There’s something especially ugly about a parent treating his son as a source of shame while refusing to examine his own actions. Cody’s father wants control over the narrative, the money, and apparently the kind of son he’s allowed to have.
Cody refuses to make that easy for him.
And I like that about him. His defiance has a purpose. Beneath it is someone who wants his father to recognize that the people affected by those political decisions are people—including his own child.
Sending Cody away doesn’t resolve that conflict. It just places him in another environment where authority figures treat his identity as a problem.
That’s what makes his refusal to apologize for who he is so important. Cody still has things to learn about trust, relationships, and protecting his heart. Knowing you’re gay doesn’t mean you’ve finished figuring yourself out. But the story is strongest when it understands that his growth doesn’t require him to become less himself.
It requires room to exist without being punished for it.
Cody and Beckett Give the Story Its Heart
I love Cody and Beckett together. I love the tension, the attraction neither of them can neatly manage, and the way Cody gets under Beckett’s skin. But what makes me invested is the support they find in each other as their relationship develops.
At Maplewood, Beckett has a role he knows how to play. He’s the golden boy. He has status, a girlfriend who happens to be the headmaster’s daughter, and a plan to graduate early and get out. From the outside, he appears to know exactly who he is and where he’s going.
Then Cody arrives, and suddenly that certainty isn’t so certain.
What interests me isn’t simply that Beckett is attracted to someone he didn’t expect. It’s that his feelings force him to confront the difference between the life he’s performing and what he actually wants. Cody becomes someone he can’t fit neatly into the version of himself that has kept him protected.
That doesn’t make Beckett’s jealousy automatically romantic, though. Wanting Cody’s attention while publicly maintaining another relationship isn’t fair to Cody. Neither is expecting him to stay away from Easton while Beckett struggles to acknowledge his own feelings.
Cody is right not to want to be an experiment.
He can care about Beckett and still need more than private affection and public uncertainty. His feelings deserve consideration, too. That boundary gives their romance more weight because attraction alone isn’t enough to make this work. Beckett has to learn that wanting someone and being ready to show up for them are different things.
And that’s why their support for each other matters so much. I’m rooting for them not just because they have chemistry, but because of the tenderness beneath all that tension—the growing sense that, in a place determined to make them feel unsafe, they can become people the other can count on.
The romance is most meaningful when it moves beyond “I can’t stop thinking about you” and toward “you don’t have to face this alone.”
Figuring Out Who You Are Isn’t a Straight Line
Self-discovery is the part of The School for Bad Boys that stayed with me.
Cody and Beckett aren’t starting from the same place. Cody has language for his identity and understands his feelings in a way Beckett doesn’t yet. Beckett is trying to reconcile his attraction with the person he has believed—or needed—himself to be.
Neither experience makes their feelings less real. But it does mean they need different things.
Beckett needs space to understand himself. Cody needs honesty and the reassurance that he won’t be treated like something shameful while that happens. Those needs can coexist, but the story has to make room for both rather than asking Cody to absorb every hurt because Beckett is confused.
I appreciated the emphasis on Cody explaining that being gay isn’t simply about sex. It’s about feelings, connection, and wanting to be with another person. His relationship with Beckett deserves the same emotional seriousness as any other romance.
That distinction matters in a setting where the adults reduce queer identity to prohibited behavior. Maplewood’s rules refuse to recognize the humanity of what these boys feel. Their affection, vulnerability, and need for companionship expose how cruel that refusal is.
They aren’t wrong for falling in love. They’re being forced to navigate a place that makes honesty dangerous.
Friendship Matters Just as Much as Romance
For all my investment in Cody and Beckett, I don’t want to overlook the importance of friendship here.
When Cody arrives at Maplewood, he’s vulnerable to bullying and surrounded by rules that offer him very little protection. Meeting Easton matters because it gives him a connection that isn’t built entirely around conflict or romantic uncertainty. Someone sees what he’s dealing with and offers support.
That shouldn’t be reduced to a reason for Beckett to get jealous.
Cody deserves friends. He deserves people he can talk to without having to untangle their attraction to him first. And he deserves a support system that doesn’t depend on whether Beckett is ready to acknowledge their relationship.
The friendships give the story another way to explore belonging. Romance can be deeply affirming, but so can finding someone who understands your experience and refuses to let you feel completely isolated in it.
In a school that uses fear to keep its students compliant, looking out for one another matters. Those connections don’t make Maplewood safe, but they make its cruelty harder to face alone.
The Headmaster Is the Problem With Maplewood
The headmaster is insane. I don’t know how else to express the frustration of watching someone preside over this environment and act as though he holds the moral high ground.
The school’s threat of expulsion and prison hangs over everything, turning even ordinary choices into potential disasters. But its explicit targeting of homosexual activity makes the headmaster’s priorities particularly clear. He isn’t simply concerned with discipline. He wants the power to decide which expressions of identity and affection are acceptable.
There’s nothing protective about that.
My frustration with Maplewood is also where my biggest reservation about the storytelling comes in. The setting creates immediate stakes, but there’s a delicate balance between exposing homophobia and using the threat of punishment to make a romance feel more dramatic.
For me, the relationship works because Cody and Beckett give us reasons to care beyond the danger of getting caught. Their feelings matter outside of the school’s rules. Their connection isn’t compelling because Maplewood calls it wrong; it’s compelling because they challenge each other, care about each other, and begin to recognize what the other needs.
The headmaster can threaten them. He doesn’t get to define what their relationship means.
Why I Kept Rooting for Them
The School for Bad Boys works best as a story about young people trying to claim ownership of their lives in a place designed to take that ownership away.
There are parts that frustrated me, especially the cruelty built into Maplewood and the ways Beckett’s uncertainty initially spills over into how he treats Cody. But those frustrations don’t erase what I loved: Cody’s refusal to accept others thoughts that he needs fixing, Beckett’s struggle to understand himself, the friendships that interrupt the isolation, and a romance that becomes stronger through mutual support.
I want Cody and Beckett together because I want them to have the chance to discover who they are without every feeling becoming evidence against them. I want Cody to be loved without conditions. For Beckett, I want him to understand that being honest with himself doesn’t make him less worthy of a future.
And more than anything, I want the care they find in each other to outlast the place that tries so hard to deny it.
