School Spirits

The Purgatory of Fourth Period

High school already feels like an endless loop of fluorescent lights and unrequited angst. You wander the halls, largely invisible to the people who matter, desperately waiting for the bell to ring so your real life can begin. (I still have a recurring nightmare about forgetting my locker combination, a solid two decades after graduation.) Megan and Nate Trinrud’s *School Spirits* takes that universal adolescent metaphor and makes it entirely, brutally literal. What if you died in your high school, and you were just stuck there? Forever.



Maddie Nears doesn't know who killed her. She just wakes up in the boiler room of Split River High, a ghost trapped in the exact building she couldn't wait to escape. The Trinruds, adapting their own graphic novel, could have easily leaned into campy *Riverdale* territory here. Instead, they’ve built something that feels closer to a John Hughes movie directed by someone with a mild obsession with true crime. The rules of this afterlife are specific and weirdly mundane. Ghosts can eat the cafeteria food, but it always tastes like dust. They can scream in the faces of their living tormentors, but the silence remains unbroken.

Peyton List carries the entire emotional architecture of the series on her shoulders. For years, she's been throwing literal kicks in *Cobra Kai*, operating with a rigid, combative posture. Here, her physicality completely changes. She slumps. Her arms hang heavy at her sides, dragged down by the sheer exhaustion of her sudden non-existence. Watch her in the early episodes when she tries to physically push through the school's exit doors, only to violently rubber-band back into the boiler room. There's a specific, desperate gasp she lets out—a sharp exhalation that physically blows the hair out of her eyes—that tells you everything about her stubborn refusal to accept her fate. It’s a beautifully observed piece of acting. As the reviewer at TV Fanatic pointed out, "Maddie Nears is one of the best characters on TV, thanks to stellar writing and terrific acting from Peyton List."



I'm not totally sure the pacing always holds up. The show occasionally gets bogged down in the minutiae of teen melodrama when the supernatural elements are vastly more interesting. But when it clicks, it really clicks. Take the scene in the pilot where Maddie attends her own missing-person assembly. The camera stays tight on her face, the background noise of the principal's drone blurring into a muffled hum. She steps onto the bleachers, waving her arms, screaming at her living boyfriend to look at her. The edit cuts back and forth between her frantic, kinetic energy and the absolute stillness of the living students who can't see her. It’s a deeply lonely sequence. You realize she isn't just grieving her death. She's grieving the fact that the world is going to keep spinning without her.

The series evolves wildly as it goes. By the time S3 rolled around in 2026, the rules had fractured, leaning away from cozy mystery and plunging into genuine horror with the inclusion of Jennifer Tilly’s chaotic energy. Maddie's best friend Simon (a wonderfully frazzled Kristian Ventura) takes on a heavier burden, and the dynamic between the living and the dead gets dangerously porous. Whether that shift from melancholy mystery to overt horror works for you probably depends on your tolerance for escalating genre chaos. Sometimes I miss the quiet simplicity of the first season's grief.



Yet, I can't stop thinking about the central tragedy of the 1980s football ghost, Wally (Milo Manheim). He died on the field, forever stuck in his uniform, smiling through a pain that has lasted forty years. That’s the real trick *School Spirits* pulls off. Underneath the twisty murder board and the red herrings, it’s just a story about kids who were robbed of the chance to grow up. They're suspended in amber, trying to make sense of a future they'll never get to touch. And maybe that's why it lingers.