When we talk about teen dramas, some TV shows come quickly to mind. From The O.C. to Gossip Girl, these are all well-known shows about the trials and tribulations of being a high schooler and figuring out who you were. But while some of the titles in this genre have become household names, a few newer series have remained under the radar. Among them is Heartbreak High, a two-season Australian series on Netflix all about depicting fully-rounded teenagers as they navigate the teenage experience through love, sex, and, of course, heartbreak.
The series, which was created by Hannah Carroll Chapman and first premiered on September 14, 2022, is a stellar teen drama that packs emotion and high stakes while still being all about teenage angst, love and friendship. The long-awaited Season 3 of the series will be premiering next week on March 25, so there’s no better time than now to tune in and catch up.
‘Heartbreak High’ Is a Must-Watch Teen Drama
There are a few reasons why Heartbreak High has become one of Netflix’s most must-watch teen dramas. Among them is the fact that while some storylines are silly and trivial, like any high school teen series, some other plot points are packed with emotional depth and high stakes. At the beginning of the series, for instance, main character Amerie Wadia (Ayesha Madon) is blindsided when her best friend of many years, Harper (Asher Yasbincek), suddenly fights with her and breaks up their friendship.
As she tries to piece together what happened, a map that she and Harper created about the school’s sexcapades, aka the Incest Map, gets exposed and Amerie is labeled as the culprit and a social pariah. The rest of the series then follows everyone who’s mentioned on the map as they’re forced to attend the Sexual Literacy Tutorial Class, AKA SLTs, pronounced “sluts.” As new friendships blossom between the group, and major secrets get revealed, Amerie works to restore her friendship with Harper, console her into remember what happened, and be there for her in her time of need.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Ten questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt 🏥ER 💉Grey’s Anatomy 🔬House 🩺Scrubs
01 A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02 Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03 What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04 How do you actually perform under extreme pressure? The worst shifts reveal things about you that the good ones never will.
05 You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
06 How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
07 How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
08 What kind of medical work do you find most compelling? What draws your attention when you walk through those doors matters.
09 What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
10 At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown. The Pitt doesn’t romanticise the work — it puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away. You are someone who needs their work to be real, who finds meaning not in the drama surrounding medicine but in medicine itself, and who has made peace with the fact that this job will take from you constantly and give back in ways that are harder to name. You don’t need the chaos to be aestheticised. You need it to be honest. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center is exactly that — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential. County General is built on the shoulders of people who show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without requiring the job to be anything other than what it is. You care deeply about patients as individual human beings, you believe in the system even when it fails you, and you understand that emergency medicine at its core is about holding the line between order and chaos for just long enough. ER is television about endurance, and you have it.
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door. Grey Sloan is a hospital where the personal and the professional are permanently, chaotically entangled, and where that entanglement produces both the greatest disasters and the most remarkable saves. You are someone who feels things fully, who forms deep attachments to the people you work with, and who understands that the most extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection. It’s messy here. You would not have it any other way.
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else. Not the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it — but the case as a puzzle, the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one. Princeton-Plainsboro is a hospital that exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind, and everyone around that mind is there because they are smart enough and stubborn enough to keep up. You work best when the stakes are highest, when the standard answer is wrong, and when the only way forward is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you would do here.
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure, and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time. Sacred Heart is a hospital where the laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable — where a terrible joke can get you through a terrible moment, and where the most ridiculous people are also, on their best days, remarkably good doctors. You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field. You lean on the people around you and you let them lean back. Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job — and you are still very much in the middle of that process, which is exactly right.
By Season 2, Amerie and Harper are on steadier ground, and the series shifts focus to some secondary characters. A highlight is the story following the neurodivergent side of Quinni (Chloé Hayden), which shows viewers how she thinks and processes the world around her. After one eureka moment, she drops her mask and shares her genuine opinions of people around her, while giving viewers a deeper understanding of her character. Quinni’s crisis tests her friendships, while splitting up her first real relationship in a heartbreaking moment.
Another important storyline for the second season is Darren (James Majoos) as he attempts to figure out his feelings for Ca$h (Will McDonald) after he gets out of jail. And when they do hit their groove, a new sexual hurdle challenges them and their connection like never before. Therefore, while Amerie’s drama still remains central to the show, and even includes her tracking down a stalker and visiting an abortion clinic after a night with Malaki (Thomas Weatherall), the series dives deep into many of the characters’ backstories, making them all complex, multidimensional and, most importantly, feel real.
The second season of Heartbreak High premiered almost two years ago on April 11, 2024, so fans of the show can’t wait to see Hartley High’s third and final chapter. The installment, which will premiere next week on March 25, will follow the returning characters as they become seniors and prepare to bid farewell to the memories they’ve shared in high school. Per the trailer, the season will be packed with drama, including the intense fallout after a senior revenge prank goes wrong. “I messed up really, really bad,” Amerie says in the trailer. “One of our mates did this, we’re going to figure out which one.”
Also teased in the trailer is a new love interest for Amerie, played by Ioane Sa’ula. While a new character is certainly exciting, the series will likely set up another love triangle between Amerie, Malakai and the newcomer, which will surely be the crux of the emotional weight this season. “There is nothing going on between me and Malakai,” Amerie says in the trailer. Only time will tell if that’s true.
With that said, with Season 3 of Heartbreak High around the corner, there’s no time like now to watch and catch up. With hilarious, punchy storylines and moments of genuine despair, betrayal and hurt, the series balances the rare feat of being a teen drama that’s not only entertaining, but emotionally moving too. Viewers root for each of the characters, even the most troubled ones, and that’s where the show finds its magic.
Release Date
2022 – 2026-00-00
Network
Netflix
Showrunner
Hannah Carroll Chapman
Directors
Gracie Otto, Neil Sharma, Adam Murfet, Jessie Oldfield
Writers
Ben Gannon, Michael Jenkins, Hannah Carroll Chapman
James Majoos