Tegan and Sara’s ‘High School’ Wasn’t Really About Tegan and Sara
The audience for High School, the TV adaptation of indie pop stars Tegan Quin and Sara Quin’s memoir about their teenage years, was obvious from the get-go. This was a show made for Tegan and Sara fans. Who else was chomping at the bit to see lightly fictionalized, younger versions of these Canadian twin wunderkinds? Especially when High School aired exclusively on Freevee, Amazon’s free-with-ads streaming platform?
But anyone tuning into the half-hour dramedy expecting a narrowly focused story of how these nobodies became somebodies would be let down. High School, over the course of its recently wrapped, eight-episode first season, focused less on the duo’s blossoming music career and more on their blossoming identities.
A large part of the book High School (a wonderful read, even if you’re not a T&S fan) involves the Quin sisters coming to terms with their sexualities. Both women identify as lesbians, something they individually came to realize during their teens. The fumbly awkwardness of discovering they like girls, not guys, is a recurring theme throughout.
Freevee’s High School follows suit. It’s to the show’s benefit, broadening it from a cover version of a band’s back story into a teen drama. As 15-year-old Tegan and Sara, respectively, identical twins Seazynn and Railey Gilliland do a fine job conveying the sisters’ attempts to guard their true feelings. Over the course of the season, they slowly break down their emotional walls, allowing themselves to become more vulnerable both to each other and the girls they’re crushing on.
(Warning: Spoilers lie ahead for the first season of High School.)
Part of that maturation, of course, is owed to their music. Tegan and Sara started their music career as Sara and Tegan, a seeming novelty act that played “battle of the bands” events in and around Calgary. But the girls weren’t a novelty, as fans know well; they were dang good. So good, in fact, that they released their first full album before they turned 19.
None of this plays out on-screen during High School’s first season, however. Instead, the show builds to a finale that uses the duo’s musical talent as a backdrop for their relationships. During the first half of the season, Tegan and Sara can barely stand to be in the same room; they’re twin sisters trying to individuate themselves. (As a twin myself, this was painfully relatable.) By the final episode, they’ve bonded over playing guitar together and writing songs. They’re gearing up to play their first live performance at a house show, and they’ve invited all their friends to come.
That includes their crushes: Phoebe (Olivia Rouyre), whom Sara likes; and Maya (Amanda Fix), Tegan’s crush. Considering we already know how the story ends professionally—Tegan and Sara just released Crybaby, their 10th album, last Friday—the heart-wrenching “will-they-won’t-they” is where the tension lies. It’s unclear whether Phoebe and Maya will show up for the gig, considering each pair has been on the rocks. Phoebe is ghosting Sara, as she’s afraid to tell Sara she won’t be around all summer like she’d promised. And Maya recently told Tegan that she likes guys, not girls, despite their physical closeness suggesting otherwise.
When Phoebe calls Sara to tell her that she won’t be able to go to the gig for no specific reason, Sara hangs up with tears welling in her eyes. Meanwhile, Maya and Tegan haven’t spoken at all. Heartbreakingly, neither sister’s crush ends up showing. But Sara decides to take matters into her own hands: She ditches the gig and heads to Phoebe’s house, confronting Phoebe about her summer plans and crying in her arms, frustrated that the only person she cares about is leaving her for the summer.
But it ends up being Tegan’s drama that hurts the most. We watch as Maya listens to a tape of Tegan performing a sad guitar ballad she wrote for Maya—”I’m so happy that we’re friends”—and realizes that shutting Tegan out was a mistake. It’s clear what’s going on in her mind: Maybe she should accept that she does have feelings for Tegan instead of denying her true self.
The final moments are heart-wrenching: Phoebe arrives at the gig just before Tegan and Sara are set to go on. She looks around for Tegan, ready to tell her how she feels … only to find Tegan making out with their mutual friend Cass (Better Things’ Hannah Riley). Phoebe immediately heads out, and Tegan tries to go after her. By the time Tegan runs out of the house, Phoebe is long gone.
It hurts in the way that Tegan and Sara songs like “The Con,” which this episode is named for, does: a sadness that’s simmering with anger, regret, and self-loathing.
But it also serves as something of a cliffhanger, a surprising way to end a show like High School. Will Phoebe and Sara stay together? Will Tegan and Maya be able to make up? Will Tegan and Sara give up on making music together, after they both separately ditch their first big break?
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Speaking with Tegan and Sara Quin themselves, along with on-screen counterparts Seazynn and Railey Gilliland, it becomes clear that ending the season this way makes perfect sense.
“Going through the episodes, I feel like people would think, ‘Oh yeah, [Tegan and Sara finally] are getting along,” Railey says. “They have found this together, and they’re going to end the season together. And I thought it was really interesting that at the end of the season, they’re apart, just like they were at the beginning.”
“It was also really great that you saw so much conflict,” Tegan says. “We often don’t see women having conflict [on-screen]. There’s an obsession with women resolving conflict, and I love that we don’t end the season with everything figured out and fixed.
“I love the idea that if the show continues to get more seasons, you’re going to continue to see the layers of conflict that still exist as these two individuals try to figure out how to exist in the same house, in the same band, in the same identity,” she continues. “Then you see all the characters around them grappling with that too—I think it’s a really powerful ending.”
For what it’s worth, “My secret girlfriend on the show [Phoebe] is my best friend” in real life, Sara says. “I still hang out with her and talk to her all the time.” So there may be hope there yet for a possible Season 2.
On the other hand, anyone who’s read High School knows that Tegan and Sara encounter some more serious drama than dealing with first girlfriends. The first season of the show covers the events of their 10th grade year; grade 11 is when things got a bit heavy in real life.
“Eleventh grade in the book is a dark part [of it],” says Tegan. “We really got into drugs. We’re very bad. We get into a lot of trouble. I start to hang out with questionable characters and get us into some major trouble. I don’t know if that’s the direction [director Clea DuVall] will go in, but when we were out selling the show, that was a big thing we talked about. Oftentimes, adolescence, especially girls’ adolescence, is really neutered and smoothed out to make it seem safe.
“What I like about this show,” she adds, “is that we beat the crap out of each other in the first episode.”
Tegan and Sara are definitely not cutesy, loving, uber-close twins on the show—which is obviously different from how they are now in real life, or how Railey and Seazynn are with each other. It’s what makes High School feel more special than what fans of the women’s music may have initially expected. No, this is not a TV biopic about the making of a band. It’s a surprisingly crushing, deliberately paced series about, well, high school. Warts and zits and fistfights and all.
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