I have to give credit to Charlie Jane Anders for pointing me towards this TV gem. Her newsletter Happy Dancing always ends with recommendations for books, films, TV and/or music and the recs I’ve followed up I’ve always enjoyed. De Volta Aos 15 (Netflix 2022–2024) is a Brazilian comedy-drama coming-of-age series with LGBTQ characters and is a lot of fun. There’s also time travel!

Anita (played by Camila Queiroz) is 30 and her life is in a rut. When she goes back to her hometown Imperatriz for her sister Luiza’s wedding, she sees that it’s true of most people she knows: they’re all stuck in lives that don’t really make them happy. So when she sits down in her childhood bedroom and finds herself reliving her first day of high school when she was 15, it seems clear what she has to do. Anita (now played by Maisa) is going to fix everyone else’s life and then she’ll magically jump back to her real life, right?

This not only goes predictably badly wrong in the past, but when Anita suddenly returns to her 30-year-old life it has changed significantly. She needs to get back to 2006 and do something differently. Which she does – over and over again for two seasons.

This show is gloriously fun. There’s the 2006 fashion and music. There’s high school drama, with love triangles ahoy. There’s hapless 30-year-old drama, in which Anita thinks she knows best and is repeatedly distracted by her love life. And there’s friendship – so much friendship.

Anita’s best friends when she was 15 the first time round were her cousin Carol and pretty-boy-who-clearly-always-had-a-crush-on-her Henrique. They were bullied and tended to hide from attention. Plus Anita’s dad died when she was 15. So there’s a lot she wants to do differently.

Her 30-year-old attitude wins her new friends this time round, most notably Ce – a gender-questioning kid who happens to be the sibling of attractive bad boy Fabrizio. And then there’s sweet-but-distant guy Joel. Thankfully the storylines aren’t solely romantic ones, but that is a major focus.

I love every actor in this show. And the small-town setting felt very familiar. As someone from an even smaller town, it’s true that in your 20s and 30s there’s a real divide between those who stay and those who leave. And both sides feel judged.

Season 3 takes a big swing and it mostly works. It’s primarily set three years later, in 2009. Anita is at university with some – though not all – of her high school friends. A lot of newcomers join the cast and the impetus of the storyline changes slightly. Anita learns in her future that there’s going to be a terrible event in 2009. And also that someone knows her time-travel secret and is toying with her.

I can see part of the logic here is the actors could no longer get away with playing 15-17 year olds. And I’m glad they found a way to work with that. It’s good to see the small changes in technology and culture even those three years apart. The tonal change from high school to college dorms isn’t huge. But I will admit that it does feel at the end of season 3 that the concept has run its course so I’m glad they gave it a definitive ending.