Parents' Guide to Forbidden Fruits

This dark horror comedy is vapidly delicious. The fashion, the soundtrack, and the looks in Forbidden Fruits are so lit. The four main characters see themselves at the top of the mall social hierarchy (at the bottom? employees of Be Calm and Cookie On, naturally). The quartet is a horror-tinged, slightly aged up reinvention of the Mean Girls Plastics: Apple (played with chilling BFF savagery by Reinhart) is Regina George, Cherry (Pendretti, who gives her shallow character surprising vulnerability) is ditzy Karen, Fig (Shipp) is a Gretchen who knows better, and newcomer Pumpkin (Tung) is Cady—there for the friendship, but perceptive enough to realize the group's dynamic is disturbed. And the Burn Book is far more literal.

The story—and its four leads—have layers like the fruits they're named after: a glossy, appealing exterior; a juicy emotional center; and something harder at the core. Will brainy Fig harvest or swallow her seeds of cognitive dissonance? Will sweet, "simple" Cherry spit out the pit, or choke on it? Is Pumpkin hiding another form, waiting to reveal her other self like a jack o' lantern? And are the rules that Apple enforces nourishing the group, or is she rotten to the core? As these questions develop, viewers realize that the young women aren't as vacuous as originally presented—there's far more beneath their stylistic surfaces. For older teen girls, taking a bite of this shiny apple just may provide some knowledge: When there's a worm in your friend group, it may be better to toss it in the compost than keep chewing around it.