The Secret Life of Lele Pons

As an unfiltered portrait of a social media star whose public persona is, quite literally, obsessively filtered, this docuseries is affecting and powerful. Viewers who've come to know Pons, after a fashion, from her YouTube videos and Instagram posts, see her in silly, giggling, happy flashes; The Secret Life of Lele Pons shows us that there's an entire iceberg of issues that lurk beneath. "People think I have the perfect life," she says at the opening of the first episode as we watch her scrolling through her past posts, a blur of gorgeous aspirational images. On social media, she continues, "you show that you do." The fact that social media personalities are intensely curated is not a new idea, but The Secret Life makes a devastating connection between social media and Pons' mental illness: she started her social media feed because her real-life awkwardness made her desperate for friends, yet the pressures of the medium have only exacerbated her problems.

Pons admits to obsessively scrolling through social media, comparing herself to the trumped-up images of others. "I'll see this one girl and it's like 'her mole is bigger than yours,'" she gives as an example of the tiny problems that loom large in her mind. "It just drives me crazy." Indeed. Pons' friends and family members tell tales of how posting on social media took up great gulps of Pons' life, affecting her schoolwork, her social life, her sleep. Possibly worst of all, Pons tells us, is that she started on social media to distract herself from the OCD symptoms that consumed most of her waking moments. It worked, far too well, and now her social media habits reinforce her insecurities and illnesses, and have handed her a host of other problems, too, like the nonstop stream of criticism she receives from commenters. The Secret Life of Lele Pons is a powerful cautionary tale about social media use gone wrong, and a portrait of one woman struggling against her inner demons.