One Critic Calls Netflix's 'The Body' Brilliant. Another Calls It Thin.

Both praise the queer best friends at the heart of Quinn Shephard's 2004-set Catholic school drama, and that's where agreement ends.

A Catholic school dance team jokingly asks the devil to help it place at regionals, and by morning its newest member is found unresponsive. That's the setup of "The Body," the eight-episode Netflix series from "Under the Bridge" creator Quinn Shephard, as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter describe it in reviews published Wednesday, the day it premiered.

The two critics agree on most of the parts and split on the whole. In Variety, Aramide Tinubu called the show "brilliant." In The Hollywood Reporter, Angie Han's bottom line was "Neither heavenly nor hellish." Their whole disagreement fits inside a 2004 cellphone.

Nobody at The LA Globe has watched "The Body." We read both reviews, which went up within the same minute, and weighed them equally; neither gives a number or letter grade.

Both describe the same setup. Co-captains Anya (Kristina Bogic) and Elise (Sara Boustany) lose a dancer to injury weeks before regionals and hold tryouts for the Lions, their all-girls troupe. Grace (Sofia Wylie), niece of the school's priest, Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha), makes the team. Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros), a new girl with a fundamentalist mother (Louisa Krause), doesn't, but gets invited to the Halloween initiation party anyway. After that night, hysteria moves through the team and then the town, from a source Han says could be divine, demonic or psychological.

Start with the phones. Tinubu lists Nokias with multi-tap texting alongside songs by Chingy, Ciara and Kelly Clarkson, and she reads the era as the plot's engine. News traveled fast but not instantly, so once the girls swear silence and wipe the photos, a lie can stay buried.

Han saw Motorola flip phones instead, with velour tracksuits and Balenciaga bags, and credits costume designer Mirren Gordon-Crozier, the only below-the-line name in either review. To Han, the period is mostly that wardrobe. She notes TVs flipping between "The Simple Life" and the Iraq War, plus a brief Donald Trump appearance as host of "The Apprentice," and finds the references too vague and too sparse to mean much. She suspects the year was picked for its nostalgia value. In Variety the year explains why the secret holds. In THR it's mostly a way to date the costumes.

They come closest on Anya and Elise. Tinubu calls the series "deliciously and unapologetically queer," with one girl sure of who she is and the other frozen in denial. Han says Bogic and Boustany have a beguiling chemistry as best friends who might be more if they could get past their terror of a culture that treats being queer as a perversion.

The split is over everyone else. Tinubu sees a cast built on need, each girl lying for what she lacks: Lisbeth wants a normal adolescence, Elise is desperate to be noticed and Anya guards her standing. Han sees types. She calls Lisbeth the show's best weapon, crediting Meszaros with a skin-crawling singsong voice, and praises Jackson Kelly as Lisbeth's earnest younger brother, Leo. But she says the writing never takes the ensemble past its basic jobs, and a promising pairing of Elise and Leo gets dropped.

The genre swings divide them the same way. Tinubu counts part thriller, part horror and part YA drama, and finds a real argument about how strict doctrine breeds shame in kids still working out who they are. Han finds the tone mostly straight-faced, neither scary nor funny, and says the show sets skimpy angel costumes next to paintings of nude saints in ecstasy without going anywhere darker. "It's content just to point out it exists," she wrote. Even the priest splits them. In Tinubu's review he's cornered by questions he can't answer, and Han says the show tells her almost nothing about what the ordeal does to his faith.

Both measure it against the same shelf. Tinubu reaches for "Bring It On," "Jennifer's Body" and "Mean Girls," and later "Heavenly Creatures" and "Thirteen"; Han pitches it as "Yellowjackets" meets "Carrie." A fan of those movies will find the references either way. What the critics dispute is whether the show earns a place next to them.

The critics' verdict: one rave, one shrug. Variety's Tinubu says the show belongs with those films as a study of teen friendships forming and breaking. THR's Han says it pays tribute to its pop culture forebears better than it joins them, and that its ambition outruns its execution.

Back in the convent, the Lions wanted to place at regionals. On its first day, their show got top marks from one judge and a middle-of-the-pack score from the other.

Source: Variety, retrieved November 11, 2026. Other sources: The Hollywood Reporter.