Netflix's Global Smash Hit High School Show Makes Euphoria Look Small

While Netflix’s massive worldwide hit high school show makes Euphoria seem tame, this isn’t necessarily an unambiguously good thing, according to its many critics. Creator Sam Levinson’s Euphoria was one of the most controversial shows of the 2020s, although the jury is still out on whether the HBO hit deserved all the proverbial online ink that was spilled in its wake or not.

Despite featuring Sydney Sweeney’s breakout performance, standout early roles for Hunter Schafer and Jacob Elordi, and a stellar central turn from Zendaya, Euphoria itself was a messy, inconsistent series. At its best, the show was a hard-hitting look at the darkest parts of modern teenage life. At its worst, Euphoria was as ludicrous as anything from the teen murder mystery Riverdale, and the show’s far-fetched plot was so divorced from reality that it made its handling of sensitive themes feel more exploitative than daring.

It didn’t take long for a new high school show to outdo even Euphoria’s outrageous depiction of teens out of control, thanks to Netflix’s K-drama Teach You a Lesson. Based on the webtoon Get Schooled, this action drama focuses on Kim Mu-yeol’s Na Hwa-jin, a former Special Forces captain who becomes an inspector for the newly created Educational Rights Protection Bureau. Established to handle an uptick in campus violence, the Educational Rights Protection Bureau allows educators to use corporal punishment and other outdated methods to discipline unruly students.

Netflix’s K-Drama Teach You A Lesson Is An Intense High School Series

Netflix Action Thriller Teach You a Lesson Han-rim

Before long, Na Hwa-jin is cracking skulls left, right and center, utilizing the unprecedented power of the Educational Rights Protection Bureau to enter troubled schools and start applying his unorthodox disciplinary measures on unsuspecting students. While this might sound like a satirical take on reactionary attempts to bring back corporal punishment, Teach You a Lesson is surprisingly, unabashedly positive in its depiction of the banned practice.

As far as high school shows that take the genre’s tropes to an extreme, Teach You a Lesson is one of the most intense series you will find, and its deceptions of extreme bullying in the world of contemporary education are used to justify the equally extreme measures taken by Na Hwa-jin. While few episodes reach the melodramatic heights of Euphoria’s Tarantino-esque finale, the show consistently portrays the teachers as ineffective and passive, while the show’s hero is an unambiguous force for good.

Real-Life Educators Didn’t Appreciate Teach You A Lesson’s Approach To School Stories

Lee Sung-Min as Choi Gang-seok in Teach You a Lesson

The original webtoon that Teach You a Lesson is based on was widely criticized for its racism and sexism, as well as its glorification of corporal punishment. While Netflix promised to address these concerns with the live-action adaptation, the real-life teacher’s union, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union, called for the show to be scrapped with a statement titled “Violence Is Not True Education.”

The union argued that the webtoon and its adaptation did little to address real issues in education, and instead focused on glorifying blatantly harmful practices. Compared to Netflix’s earlier teen dramas Cobra Kai and Sex Education, the show’s reception has been mixed, with even positive reviews for Teach You a Lesson conceding that the depiction of state-sanctioned violence toward children as an answer to classroom violence is a fairly unhinged one.

Much as it might be loathed by real-life teachers who deal with actual students daily, Teach You a Lesson still managed to garner itself a large following across the world. The K-drama proved a huge hit on Netflix despite, or, like Euphoria before it, perhaps because of the controversy surrounding its story. Thus, Netflix’s Euphoria replacement is not only as far-fetched as the original show, but also, thanks to the objections of real-life educators, Teach You a Lesson is also just as controversial as the earlier American hit.