Dramas like
Extracurricular

A boy who solves everything by calculating it, until the calculation runs out. Same register exactly: eight episodes of school violence shot as ugliness rather than style, a lead whose intelligence is the weapon, and a story about what that costs the people standing near him. Difference: fights rather than a business, no money in it and no adults worth naming, and at heavy 5 with comfort 1 there is even less relief than here.

Hooks early Episode 1. Eight episodes, zero filler, and the first fight tells you exactly what kind of show this is.

School as a system with rules you can work, and children working it. Same appetite for teenagers behaving like operators instead of victims, ten episodes at pace 5, and the same flat camera on what they do to each other. Difference: a closed classroom vote rather than money, no crime outside the building, and it keeps a moral centre this one refuses to hand you.

Hooks early Episode 1. The monthly popularity vote and the class ranking it creates are laid out immediately.

The same children, seen from the bench. Same subject, minors doing adult harm and the adult world deciding what to do about it, and the same refusal to soften anybody in the room. Ten episodes at heavy 5 and comfort 1, and the first hour is the hardest of the run. Difference: institutional and episodic rather than a two-hander, no thriller momentum, and it argues about consequences where this one only shows them.

Hooks early Episode 1, and it is the hardest case in the series. Nothing later is easier to sit through, and the show never lets up.

A school where the adults are irrelevant and the students are running the case themselves. Same bleak corridor and the same nihilism about what teenagers do once they decide nobody is coming, twelve episodes at comfort 1. Difference: a mystery structure that cannot keep its own secrets straight, so the tension is spent by the back half, and there is no friendship in it worth the name.

Hooks early Episode 1. The ruling she refuses to accept opens the show.

One decision made under pressure, then twenty years of bill. Same coldness towards its own characters and the same interest in what somebody becomes after crossing a line, seven episodes at heavy 5. Difference: three performers playing one woman across decades, adult self-loathing rather than a school timetable, and it is explicit about bodies in a way this never is.

Slow start Episode 3, when the lead is recast and the show reveals it is a relay race across three actresses rather than one story.

The same bad idea, twenty years later, with mortgages attached. Same shape of childhood friends bound together by something criminal they cannot put down, and the same physical urgency, because the lead spends fourteen episodes fighting his own body. Difference: adults with job titles and a procedural spine, a case built to be worked rather than a spiral to be ridden, and none of the school-as-arena appeal.

Hooks early Episode 1. The forced addiction happens straight away and the countdown starts with it.

Money that accrues while people degrade themselves to earn it. Same argument about what a person will do once a number is attached to their dignity, eight episodes at heavy 5 and comfort 1, and the same refusal to make any of it fun. Difference: adults sealed in a building rather than teenagers in a school, a satire with a narrator on top, and the middle is punishing by design.

Hooks early Episode 2, once the time for money rule is understood and the floors start turning on each other.