Since we found ourselves comparing the show to Netflix's Locke & Key, check out Ron's recaps of the show on Show Snob.
Ron: Welcome to our Stereo Geeks Special! In this episode we’ll be previewing YTV’s The Hardy Boys. I’m Ron.
Mon: And I’m Mon.
Ron: This show, adapted from the famous book series, dropped its first season on Hulu in December 2020. But here in Canada, the show has only just debuted.
Mon: We hadn’t heard about this show till the press release and screeners landed in our inboxes. I do wonder why the promotion for this show has been so under the radar. It’s quite similar to how the Nancy Drew adaptation also made its way to screens, but with almost zero hype.
Ron: Well, Corus sent us the first two episodes to preview. So here we are. The story follows Frank and Joe Hardy, played by Rohan Campbell and Alexander Elliot, as they deal with their mother's death, while also secretly investigating who killed her. This is definitely not The Hardy Boys of our childhood.
Mon: There have been some significant changes made to the characters. For one, there is a four-year age difference between Frank and Joe, whereas in the books it's consistently been just a year. Their mom, from being a librarian, is now a journalist. Their dad, Fenton Hardy, played by James Tupper, works with the police force as a detective. But once they moved to Bridgeport, which is his hometown, as well as his wife Laura's hometown, he turns into a private detective. He appears to be investigating the cause of his wife's death, which involves some treasure hunting, some secret mystery that we don't know about. Does he have a license in Bridgeport? Who knows?
There are a lot of characters who have been adapted from the books to the screen. So, we have their friends, Chet, Biff, Callie. They also have their aunt, Gertrude. Everyone is slightly different from what we expected in the books. Chet in the books was always written as a plus-size character but somehow here, he's not. I like the fact that Biff was a boy in the books but here she is a girl, and that too, she is a girl of color, and her mom is a cop in Bridgeport.
Tthere are a few changes which are weird. Why is Aunt Gertrude so young? Just like the actor's ages. James Tupper, who plays Fenton Hardy, and is supposed to be Gertrude’s older brother, is 25 years older than the actor playing Gertrude. Let that sink in. Especially since in the books, Gertrude is Fenton’s older sister. It also makes it a little bit weird that Aunt Gertrude is being played by an actress who is only seven years older than the actor playing Frank Hardy. I mean, it just looks weird. And we haven't even got to the story yet.
Ron: A lot happens in the first episode. We’re introduced to the family dynamic. Obviously, Laura is very close to her sons. Closer somewhat to Frank than to Joe? The younger boy seems to be left behind a lot. The focus very much is on Frank's baseball, Frank's game playing, Frank and Laura. That's central to the story. Fenton kind of flips in and out. I guess, because he's a cop, he's busy all the time. It seems to be that Laura used to be a journalist but for the last couple of years she hasn't been doing any writing. As we find out in the second episode, she was apparently still doing her work. She was doing it in secret and away from her family. We presume that the rest of the season will explain why that was.
But then the first episode also has another plot point. And that is of a ship called the Astghik, which is attacked, blown up. Somebody escapes, but they've also found some kind of treasure. What does that have to do with Laura, her death? Who are these people who attacked the board? What is their connection to the Hardys? There's a lot of setup. I feel like the first episode didn't have to bring that in at all. Since the first episode was setting up the dynamic of the Hardy family, and was showing how Laura's death was going to impact them, that should have been the only story. Bringing in the mystery kinda muddy the waters a little bit.
Especially because we kind of go back and forth a little bit, right at the start, between the Hardy family and the ship incident. But then once Laura's death happens, the ship is completely forgotten till much later. While I was watching it, I was literally like, oh, hang on, what happened to that ship? And then suddenly, somebody was talking about it. And by the end of that episode, we figure out that there's actually a connection. It may have been an editing thing, but I feel like story wise, the narrative just didn't flow.
Mon: Here's the thing. What do we know about the Hardy Boys? We know that they are amateur sleuths. That's where this show should have started. By kicking off the show with the kids playing video games, with Laura being this fun mom, with the focus on Frank's baseball, with Joe being bullied, when is the sleuthing? And then you go into Laura's death, but instead of focusing on the kids’ grief, suddenly they are upped and offed to a whole new town. We are introduced to a whole new bunch of characters, and we have the setup for the mystery. Why does it have to be so convoluted?
I understand the need to put characters first. You want people to become attached to them, to relate to them, especially if your audience is likely to be of a varied age range. But when you're adapting something which is so famous, and when it has just one core feature, that of being young amateur detectives, then why make it so complicated? Why make it so intense? Where's the fun in this?
Ron: The opening scene actually feels a lot more fun than I expected it to be. There's this really sweet, fun-loving dynamic between Laura and her children. Well, Laura and Frank, more than Joe. They seem to be teasing him more than anything else. But then it kind of gets derailed, because obviously there's a death, there's a funeral, there's grief. But it all seems like somebody is going through a checklist, ticking things off as the episode is progressing. I don't think it needed to be like that.
And you made a really good point about the fact that Frank and Joe are supposed to be sleuths. At the end of the first episode when they’re like, we need to investigate what happened to our mom, I'm like, why? Your dad is on the case; why do you need to get involved at all? Just try and adapt to the whole new place that you’re living in. You’ve just moved to Bridgeport; you've lost your mom; you’re making new friends. It's a lot! You don't need to take this on. The good thing is that the friends that they have are very into it. They immediately want to help them; they want to investigate. They ended up, in the second episode, being in a little bit of danger because of the investigation. But it's a good thing that we're seeing a support system around these two.
Mon: Honestly, my favorite part of the first two episodes was the bit in the hotel in the second episode when they're trying to get some information about the mystery that they're solving. The way the entire crew work together, how intelligent and smart they are, the work like a well-oiled machine, even though they've just met. And I enjoyed that. That's kind of the fun aspect that we were looking for when we heard about this show.
Ron: And that's actually what made The Hardy Boys books so much fun to read. Of course, in the books, it was really just Frank and Joe; their friends used to come in and out. But here, I feel like there's a lot more room for them to have a group around them. Having seen the first two episodes, I kind of wish that it had only been set in Bridgeport, that there wasn't, you know, the whole moving to another town scenario. Because that scene in the hotel, it really works and it was fun. I would have loved for that to have been introduced in the first episode. That we see that this group is already working together so well. They know how to do these investigations, and it doesn't have to be something huge like their mom’s death. It can be something smaller, but you can see that they're working together as a team. On the other hand, let us gradually move towards that. The fact that these guys just met, and they’re already working so well, it doesn't quite fit.
Mon: You and I, we grew up reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, and seeing these shows adapted into rather dark and intense series for, I guess, younger audiences, I feel like the message is lost. And the message is simply that kids like role-playing. Kids are smart; they like having a little bit of fun. And if they're solving some mysteries on the side, what's so bad about that?
Ron: But I think that all the mysteries on the side should have been the main thrust, because that's what made these books so much fun to read. Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, their stories were all about their little investigations. Everything else that happened around it was part of the investigation or fueled their information or their knowledge. This is going the opposite way. And I feel like they're just adding darkness, for the sake of it. In The Hardy Boys books, their mom has already passed away, a long time ago. They've learned to adapt to life with just their father and their aunt. That could have been a starting point to this series, as well. And it would have been nice to see a father bringing up his children on his own; it’s still something we don't see, and it would have been nice to avoid the dead mom trope. I'm honestly a little bit surprised that we’re still getting TV shows about it. That's what I liked about Locke & Key. Of course, that was based on a comic book series. But over there, it's the father who's passed away, and it’s the mom who is trying to cope, and she's kind of struggling a little bit. But at least there was that subversion. Here, not only do you have the dead mom trope, you have the absent father trope, so the aunt has to step in. And she's like, super young and not able to do this job because it's not her job to do. Two episodes in and we still don't know what Aunt Trudy does for a living, though. So yeah, it's feeling a bit tropey.
Mon: It's funny you mentioned Locke & Key because I got a lot of Locke & Key vibes from this show. It has a lot of similar beats, be it the family moving from one town to their hometown, discovering all these new places, reuniting with a long-lost relative, some family wealth spoken of, meeting new friends, discovering mysteries, and stuff. It was so derivative. And I don't mean derivative of just Locke & Key. I mean, in general.
Anytime you're dealing with a series or a film which has kids dealing with the death of a parent, it always falls into the same category of events. They're whisked away from the environment that they know and then, instead of grieving, suddenly they're investigating stuff or they're very good at compartmentalizing what just happened to them. I guess I just wanted something a little bit more original. And so far, two episodes in, the most interesting fact is that, yeah, we have a more diverse cast among the friends, but that's it.
Ron: So there appear to be a few mysteries happening, and I'm guessing that they are interconnected. The ship incident in the first episode has some vague connection to the plane incident in the second episode, in the sense that the same man was involved in both. In the first, he was killing the ship captain. In the second episode, the treasure that the man had stolen was stolen from him. So, there's a connection there which is interesting. But it's kind of a stretch of the imagination that both those events would somehow be connected to Frank and Joe Hardy.
In the second episode, we see that the man who stole the treasure and jumped off a plane lands up randomly in Bridgeport, on the beach and is found by Joe's friend, Biff, who then Joe helps out. My suspension of disbelief can only be suspended so far.
Mon: In general, I think the whole Joe Hardy-Biff Hopper thing just isn't working for me. I mean, they're trying to do the whole-antagonistic-relationship but become-best-friends kind of thing, that's not working anyway. And then these two kids sort of being involved with this strange man who's stealing people's treasure? I’m just not comfortable. At least Frank, when he's on his investigations, he has three to four people with him. And Joe and Biff are little kids, they should be at home.
Also, this being the summer, none of them have school. So, what exactly was Fenton thinking? They have nothing to occupy their minds, and no adult supervision. Fenton’s run off on his investigation, the grandmother, obviously has some kind of hate for the Hardy family, except for Frank. I don't know why. And Gertrude, I guess, actually has a life, though we don’t know what she does with it. So, what are these two kids doing? This is family negligence!
Ron: Also, I feel like now that Joe is here in Bridgeport, whatever growth that Biff was probably looking forward to is not happening. She doesn't do anything. She's literally been shunted out of her own story. That's kind of annoying.
Mon: It's bad enough that we only have two female characters, at the moment, among the friends’ groups. But I also feel like it's so obvious that they're being touted as love interests. First of all, I really hope we don't have any romantic storyline for the little kids because nobody needs that. And even with Callie Shaw, I mean, we know that in the books, Callie and Frank do have a relationship but who wants that? We really want them to be fleshed out as characters with their own interests and their own skills.
Ron: Especially since we know that Frank had a girlfriend for a while back in his hometown. And for him to have another girlfriend, so soon after losing his mom and his former life, it'd just be odd. And so far, it seems like in Frank's friends’ group, everybody has a skill and Callie is ‘the girl’. What is her skill exactly? We don't know that yet. We need more for Callie and Biff before they become love interests. Is this show going to give us that? I know we're only two episodes in but considering that this first season is only 13 episodes, I don't think that's enough time.
Mon: And this show has a lot of characters. Just around the main cast, we have four members of the Hardy family, plus the grandmom. Frank's friends include Chet, Phil, and Callie. Joe’s friends with Beth, who also has her mom, Officer Hooper. And then there're all the bad guys. It's a lot of people. How much screen time are they going to get? How much growth are they going to get? Who's going to be sacrificed along the way?
And these aren't like short episodes either; they're 45 minutes long. There's a lot going in there, and still I felt like the first episode—despite having so much in there—was very, very slow paced. The second one definitely picked up, but it still had the issue of being overly convoluted by going back and forth and trying very hard to show us all this family drama, when it's kind of obvious that they prefer the mystery.
Ron: There are a few things that I enjoyed. In the first episode we see Laura and Frank have a conversation about peoples tells. And in the second episode that actually helps Frank interrogate a suspect. Of course, the issue with that scene was that Callie kind of became a bystander. So yeah, there's goods and bads.
I am curious to know why Joe is so cynical. In the first episode, we see during the funeral for Laura, Joe doesn’t actually want to talk to any of the funeral goers because he thinks they're all here for “the show” and not because they actually cared for their mom. Where is a 12-year-old coming with this? How does he feel like this already? I was kind of hoping that the second episode would explain something, but it goes full-on sleuth version of Joe, and we didn’t get to find out his inner life.
I think my issue with the first and second episode was that there were moments in the pilot where Frank and Joe did try and process their grief, whereas the second episode it feels like they’re overcome some amount of their grief. But it's not possible, the timeframe is too short.
And also, let's not forget some really scary stuff is happening with Joe. In the opening episode he gets nabbed at knifepoint by a very scary man. He's eventually rescued, but that's traumatic. And this is shortly after his mother's funeral. That's two different kinds of trauma happening to a very small boy. And in the second episode, the man who he’s helping breaks into his room. It's just creepy! Why aren’t we dealing with this? I don't care if the series is set in the 90s it's still pretty creepy.
Mon: And Joe doesn't react. He doesn't react at all. Is he emotionless? Is he numb? What's going on? Because we don't know these characters from before their mother's death, we don't understand them after.
Ron: We have one emotional outburst from Joe, that's at the scene of their mother's death. So first of all, why did Fenton take them there? And he leaves them alone when he goes to check out what happened. That doesn't make any sense, why would you do that? You would hang on to your children, you just lost their mother! Fenton does not seem like a good character, and I'm actually wondering whether they’re leaning into Fenton is a bad person.
Like, he literally tells them that they're moving to Bridgeport, on the day of Laura's funeral. Who does that? I don't get it.
Mon: Just prior to Laura's death, she has a conversation with Fenton about how he needs to be careful because she literally cannot take care of the kids on her own. I honestly think the foreshadowing was completely incorrectly done there, because Fenton’s the one who's been a negligent father.
And they don't have to even say it in words, you can get from how he's behaving that he does not want any responsibility for these kids, his own kids.
Ron: Fenton has hardly had, what, three scenes with the children? And all of them were after Laura's death. We have no idea how he and the children actually react to each other. We see Frank and Joe breaking into his suitcase to find out information; he figures out that they've done that, but he kinda just lets them go. And he's like, ‘Oh, don't do this again’. And that's just before he's going off to a foreign country to investigate Laura's death. This is not good parenting.
Mon: The show has outlined Fenton and Laura as such: Fenton is a good cop; Laura is a good mother.
Ron: I think if the angle for the first season is that Frank and Joe are going to investigate their mom's death, then we need to know how this family worked before she died. We don't see Fenton in the first episode till well after a lot of the events have happened; why should we care about this person?
And even when, in the second episode, he calls Joe and Frank from his investigation, he has a short conversation with Joe, but he wants to talk to Frank. He doesn't ask them how they're feeling, how they're doing what they do. He just wants to find out from Frank if Frank knew that Laura was actually still working; and she had something to do with this huge case and maybe that's why she got killed. Dude, you have one phone call to make, this is what you talk about?
Again, you can’t help but compare it to Locke & Key. In that series, Nina is not a very good mom; she struggled with alcoholism before; she has taken her husband's death very badly. She is sometimes absent, but she’s really trying to be there for them. Fenton is the antithesis of what Nina is trying to do in that show. It's really making me struggle with this character, and it's taking me away from the show, actually.
Mon: We were so annoyed with how Quentin has been portrayed that honestly, it is hard to be invested in this character at all. And I guess that's why we keep comparing it to Locke & Key which also has its problems—the source material, we definitely had a lot of issues with—but because it's so similar in its essential feeling, we can’t actually help to compare how the two parents behave.
Ron: What about the mystery? Are we feeling like there's enough there for us to continue watching? I don't feel like I'm that taken with it. What is this treasure? Why are people being killed over it? What is this other man in the second episode doing with the treasure? I wish we had a little bit more information.
Also, is it actually tied into Laura's death? And what does the grandmom have to do with all this, because apparently it was her boat, but she didn't know about it because she doesn't manage it. I’m so confused.
There’s a way to outline a mystery, especially if it's going to continue for an entire season of 13 episodes. I don't think that what we've got so far has done it justice.
Mon: The production values of this show? Brilliant. And you can see the amount of effort that has gone into making the show. The trouble is that the execution is quite lackluster and a little bit haphazard. Which is why you don't know whether you should be immersed in the drama or in the central investigation, because neither of them are getting their due.
As you mentioned before, it does feel like the writing and the editing is desperately trying to tick off a whole bunch of checks on a checklist. Are they succeeding? Maybe, internally they are, but the audience is not getting that cohesive feel that a story like this should have. Even if something is going to be playing out over 13 episodes, you should still feel like you are on a journey.
Right now, you feel like you're on a roller coaster, and you keep getting shoved from one car to the other.
Ron: I know we've already compared The Hardy Boys to Locke & Key, but there's another show that I wanted to talk about and that's Walker. Hopefully, we'll have the time to do an episode just on Walker because it's not what we expected.
Now that's another show where the pilot did way too much but gave us enough to want to come back for more. And the second episode was brilliant—so good that we’re actually looking forward to catching it every week. I really, really wanted the second episode of The Hardy Boys to do that for me; it didn't. And it was also disconnected from the first episode, so it really took me out of the whole experience and I just don't think we're gonna see anymore.
Mon: I almost feel like this show deserved to have a classic treatment. Go with episodic investigations. Make it fun. Make it humorous. Make it smart.
Ron: Where is the fun? I just need some fun.
The thing about Locke & Key was—I know, we again comparing the two, but I can’t help it. But Locke & Key, the first three episodes, I struggled a little bit with. I did like the aesthetic, and though I found the characters a little bit stale, I liked the entire story that we'd been told in those first few episodes.
But then it just got so much better. The characters became more interesting, the story was more interesting. Of course, the visuals are great, it's a Netflix show. But this series, I'm just not feeling that. And the other thing that I really liked bout Locke & Key was that they somehow managed to bring the fun in. Yes, they had a little bit of magic to play with, and that helped, but there was also this sinister angle with a very very scary villain. But despite that, they still managed to have so much fun. And it was bright and colourful. I think The Hardy Boys needs to bring that lightness in much earlier. Of course, it becomes very hard when you had a huge death in the first episode. But the second episode could have done it.
Mon: I think our expectations were pretty low going into the series, especially since there was no hype and we were surprised that this series even existed. But you always want to give everything a chance. No one goes out there to make a bad product, but sometimes you need to take a step back and see what you're doing.
The Hardy Boys book series have been around since 1927, they've gone through several reimaginings, they've had their own issues, their own problems, but the essence of it remains. So many of us literally grew up with these characters. So, when you bring them to the screen, you need to boil it down to one pitch perfect angle and just run with it.
I think this over reliance on being dark and edgy in every single product that you create is honestly making the entertainment industry boring and one note.
While I do think that some people can find themselves invested in this series, I honestly don't find myself, going back to this. I may not even have given it a chance if we hadn't received the screeners. I'm glad that we did. But I think it could have been a much more imaginative and innovative show if they just thought a little bit harder about it.
Ron: I also feel like this is not a show that works on a weekly basis. I know that Hulu dropped all episodes on the same day maybe this is a marathon watch. I'm actually interested to go back to the show once we get all 13 episodes here in Canada, and then maybe our views will change.
Have you watched the first two episodes of The Hardy Boys? What did you think? We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us on Twitter @Stereo_Geeks. Or send us an email [email protected]. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And see you next week!
Mon: The Stereo Geeks logo was created using Canva. The music for our podcast comes courtesy Audionautix.
[Continuum by Audionautix plays]
Transcription by Otter.ai, Ron, and Mon.