Like its teenage characters, School 2013 is awkward, earnest, and testing its limits. Although it’s told from the perspective of Jang Na Ra and Daniel Choi’s rather hapless teachers, the relationships and struggles of the students form the heart of the show, and it does a particularly good job exploring the lives of young men on the margins and the ways that society and traditional schooling fail them. To its credit, it avoids the feel-good fallacy that a savior teacher is all it takes to overcome these issues, suggesting that while supportive adults can certainly help, larger structural changes are needed to keep at-risk kids from slipping through the cracks. It was also nice to see a show ditch the standard heteronormative love square and pair up its two main male students and two main female students instead. While romance isn't the central focus, the recognition that queer kids face their own range of issues (and can find awesome partners) was appreciated. The plotting can be clunky at times and it’s not an especially realistic look at the art of teaching, but the show’s obvious love for its characters as they fumble towards adulthood and its refusal to endorse magical solutions to their problems elevate it above most high school shows. Its lessons may be messy, but they ring all the more true because of it.