Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Me’ On Apple TV+, Where A Kid Goes To A New School And Finds Out He’s A Shapeshifter

When you’re in middle school, you really don’t know who you are or what you’re going to be. Now imagine coming to a new school when you’re 12 and not knowing anyone at all. This is the situation the main character of a new Apple TV+ series for tweens and teens finds himself in, and the way he responds to the situation is unexpected.

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Opening Shot: Rain comes down outside a classroom window, and a student looks at it coming down from his desk.

The Gist: Ben Vasani (Lucian-River Chauhan), sees Jason (Brock Duncan), the class bully, torturing another kid, and decides to do something. His stepsister, Max Davis (Abigail Pniowsky), sees what he’s about to do and shakes her head to discourage it. He trips Jason anyway, and Jason and his thugs chase Ben into the bathroom, where Ben hides in a stall. But when the teens open the stall, a different kid comes out.

“Four, maybe five weeks earlier.” It’s Ben’s first day of school; he moved to town with his mother Elizabeth (Dilshad Vadsaria) when she married Max’s dad, Phil (Kyle Howard). Another student, Kenny (Jeremiah Friedlander), is tasked with showing Ben around, and they seem to get along. It helps that Kenny is buddies with Max. But Ben goes through the day wondering who he wants to be at this new school. He also has a run-in with Jason, who breaks the camera Ben brought to school. He goes to bed that night with Max’s words in his head: “Who do you want to be?”

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Ben wakes up the next morning and wonders why everyone in the house is looking at him like he’s an intruder. He looks in the mirror and sees Kenny looking back at him.

As Elizabeth and Phil frantically try to figure out what happened to Ben, Ben convinces Max about who he actually is, and she tells him to hide. Elizabeth and Phil calls on Phil’s friend, police detective Darren Kennedy (Sharif Atkins), to try to find Ben. In the meantime, Ben encounters a girl (Amanda Reid) who knows what he’s going through, and tells him “You’ve done nothing wrong. You’re OK. Things will get better.”

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What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Me , created by Barry L. Levy ( StartUp ), has a similar story as I Woke Up A Vampire , but a somewhat less frantic vibe.

Our Take: If you didn’t realize from our description above, Ben finds out in the first episode of Me that he can shapeshift to look like anyone he encounters. The girl who lets him know what is going on, via some very clever Cat Stevens lyrics, is Carter, Darren’s missing daughter. She is going to help him control this newfound power, but during the first couple of episodes, he has no idea how to harness it.

What we liked about the show is that Ben and Max, forced together by the marriage of their respective parents, end up getting along right away. In fact, Max seems to quickly becomes Ben’s confidant when it comes to his shapeshifting, helping him to figure out how to trigger it. Usually, new step-siblings are shown being either indifferent to each other or flat-out not getting along. But Max seems to have a lot of empathy for Ben, and has been through enough in her young life to know that change is tough to manage sometimes. But she adds colored streaks in her hair, not change into a complete other person.

It’ll be fun to watch Ben harness this power, but we’re not sure to what end, besides the amorphous goal of trying to figure out who he wants to be in this new school. It seems that he’ll be forever trying to outwit Jason, the nostril-flaring class bully, but that he’ll find allies in Max, Kenny and Owen (Jonathan Bergman), a kid he helps out in Episode 2. We’re also not quite sure what happened to Carter; Darren tells Ben the story about what happened to her, but it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But she definitely has a role in Ben’s development; we’re just not sure what the “rules” are behind when she appears and how she helps Ben.

What Age Group Is This For?: The show is definitely for the 8 and up crowd, though our 9-year-old wasn’t particularly interested in the show when we showed it to her.

Parting Shot: As we hear the Cat Stevens song “Father And Son”, which is where ghostly Carter got her soothing words to Ben, Darren looks at a picture of Carter when she was younger.

Sleeper Star: For years, Kyle Howard generally played young, snotty dudes in shows and movies. Now he’s playing a grey-haired, dad-joke spewing middle-aged man with a beard. It makes us feel old, but he does a good job as Phil.

Most Pilot-y Line: Why would Ben bring a vintage camera with an expensive lens to school to begin with? First of all, that makes him a target, second of all, well, the Jasons of the world are perfectly happy to break that camera when they get a chance. We’re not quite sure what happened after Jason knocked the camera out of Ben’s hand, but we do know Ben should have just left the camera at home.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Me meanders a bit as Ben tries to figure out exactly how to manage and use his shapeshifting ability. But there are good performances throughout the show and it shows a blended family that actually gets along.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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