Fancy some addictive bingeing on lockdown that's a GenZ light throwback to The Goonies for us oldies but with all the once-over-lightly snap crackle and hum of The O.C.?
Well the new YA Netflix show Outer Banks may well fit the bill. And while I am clearly light years away from the teen target age demo this show became a guilty pleasure very quickly!
This 10-episode show is a coming-of-age story wrapped up in a high-stakes treasure hunt, introducing a pod of mostly unknown actors as a tight group of local teens otherwise known as 'the Pogues'.
John B (played the impossibly named Chase Stokes) is the obvious leader of the pack. He's likeable, kind-hearted, always doing the right thing, almost always shirtless and beloved by his motley crew.
That crew consists of rakish bad boy JJ, nerdy good boy Pope and bolshy good and bad girl Kiara. Their hood is the Cut, the wrong side of the Outer Banks of North Carolina where each summer rich kids 'the Kooks' come to play.
When a big hurricane kills the power for the island, something washes up into their mostly carefree beach dwelling surfer lives, setting off an increasingly WTF chain of events that propel each episode through to its cliff-hanger finale.
There's John B's search for his missing father, the forbidden romances, the inner-crew spats between our brats and the escalating conflict between the Pogues and the as their summer becomes one big clue-chasing roller coaster.
The show's golden, backlit laid-back coastal vibe is very immersive and easy on the eye, think The Notebook meets Dawson's Creek.
I've always been partial to a little treasure hunting and the friendship dynamics of this worked a treat. Of course, some deeply cringe-worthy moments come with the territory and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to guess the plot twists, but Outer Banks isn't the kind of show to over-think.
Whether this will hit the dizzy heights of the likes of Riverdale for Netflix with the young-at-heart millennials and GenZs will be an interesting enough mystery in itself.
For me, it ticked most of my binge-worthy boxes and I gobbled it all up in just three days.
Outer Banks was released via Netflix this week.
