Summary
A seen-before story about youngsters behaving badly and the dangerous lure of easy profit.
This is the kind of show you’ve seen before — especially on Netflix, which loves a good young-people-turn-to-drug-dealing drama, especially if it’s an international project. The most recent and relevant was the German dramedy How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast). The Club (Netflix) is much the same idea, though with a different slant on culture and class; whereas that show was about someone turning to selling drugs as a last-gasp effort to impress an ex-girlfriend, this one is about well-off kids realizing that peddling MDMA is simply more expedient than working within the law.
So it involves class, then, and privilege, and to some extent Mexican culture, though not to the extent that you could consider The Club to be about those things any more than it’s about various genre-standard shenanigans; encroaching on a dangerous rival dealer’s turf, trouble with supply, romantic entanglements — all the usual suspects are present and correct, with the additional contemporary wrinkle of a dating app designed and launched by one of the characters that crops up now and again in various ways.
Stretched over 25 half-hour episodes, there’s a lot of The Club to chew through, and it’s breezy enough that many will. But it’s certainly not as addictive as the product its misfit cast are peddling, and struggles to establish its own territory on a platform teeming with competitors.
