![]() ![]() Clad in red-the color for coaches-Paxton looks out of place, telegraphing a discomfort that the character seems unable to voice. As the season goes on, seeing him around becomes unsettling. Rather than featuring in Devi’s story, Paxton only pops up in a handful of scenes. Yet when he comes back, the show wisely keeps him in the background for much of the season. When he got accepted into Arizona State University without an athletic scholarship, his coming-of-age arc seemed complete he’d worked hard and matured enough to earn the grades he needed to get out of Sherman Oaks. His return is especially unexpected: Throughout the previous seasons, Paxton yearned to prove to others that he was more than just a champion swimmer with a pretty face. Never Have I Ever tackles the problem directly, bringing Paxton back specifically to focus on his inability to grow up. Moves like these allowed plots-usually romantic ones-to advance, but they more often than not also got in the way of depicting characters’ emotional growth into adulthood. The O.C., Dawson’s Creek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer had college-age characters drop out and enter the workforce to keep them in the storyline. Gossip Girl practically forgot that its characters were students at all despite the early seasons showing the ensemble vying for spots at prestigious institutions, the show never followed them into classrooms. Somehow, Veronica Mars ended up at a school that also admitted most of her former classmates. Series about teenagers tend to struggle with the college years at a time when people naturally grow apart, such programs twist narrative logic to keep characters together. Instead, his arrested development yields a refreshing take on a common problem for coming-of-age shows. ![]() Paxton had been the object of affection for the series’ protagonist, Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), since the pilot I assumed that the show sought to retain him as a love interest.īut as it turns out, Paxton’s return isn’t about forcing him to stay in Devi’s orbit. The development initially felt like a contrived device to keep a character who had graduated from high school in the mix. Two episodes in-and after only two weeks spent attending college-he has dropped out and returned to his alma mater, where he has immediately taken a job as the assistant swim coach. However, at the start of the show’s fourth and final season (which began streaming this week), Paxton appears to have forgotten his own advice. ![]() “Defy other people’s expectations of you, and don’t ever let a label define you.” “Push yourself out there,” he told his classmates. In the previous season of Netflix’s sparkly teen comedy Never Have I Ever, Sherman Oaks High’s resident heartthrob, Paxton Hall-Yoshida (played by Darren Barnet), gave a poignant speech at his graduation about persistence. ![]()
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