Stars: 4/5

Picture yourself in middle school: young, full of conflicting emotions and in a constant state of self-discovery. Many people used a journal to process all of those new feelings along with their most private thoughts. Now, imagine reading that journal – or something equally as embarrassingly private from your youth – to an audience full of strangers.
Put all of those elements together, and you’ve got “The Mortified Guide,” Netflix’s new short series.
Over the course of six episodes, some pretty brave individuals read from their actual journals and share intimate secrets about their young lives they would never dream of saying aloud at the time they were written.
Episodes are called “volumes,” and each one covers common, hard-hitting topics that most people go through in our shared human experience. The inaugural season’s topics include family, fitting in, love and sex, growing up gay and pop culture. While the performances are all very specifically individual and varied, they share a common thread that helps anyone feel the second-hand embarrassment as if it were their own.
Despite the cringe-worthiness of many of the situations, their bravery to talk about deep parts of their lives so openly shows a kind of empathetic honesty that is missing from most of reality TV.
One woman, during the episode “Growing Up Gay,” told the story of how watching the soap opera “All My Children” – with its lesbian main character Bianca Montgomery – helped her come to terms with her own sexuality. She notes, in one particular moment on the show, Bianca and her mother have a heated discussion about Bianca’s sexuality, and her mother admits, essentially, that it doesn’t matter who her daughter loves as long as Bianca is happy.
The woman continued by saying that she sent a letter to the actress who played Bianca on the show, Eden Riegel, thanking her for the heartfelt portrayal of her character and explaining how it gave her courage to come out to her own mother. In a touching moment, “The Mortified Guide” had brought Eden Riegel in to read the woman’s letter for her and the audience.
This story was full of humor as well as heart and is a good depiction of what viewers can expect from the show. Of course, some stories are more similar to the woman whose journal is filled with erotic “Harry Potter” fan fiction from when she was 13.
“The Mortified Guide” is a refreshing celebration of what makes us who we are as people, which is summed up perfectly by the tagline at the end of each episode: “We are freaks, we are fragile and we all survived.”