If three seasons of Neftlix’s semi-autobiographical teen comedy Never Have I Ever have taught us anything, it’s that we are firmly in the era of post-ironic Crocs and, more pertinently, the hot jock renaissance.
For as long as the genre has existed, the hot jock archetype has been a staple in entertainment for and about young people, providing viewers a reliable supply of eye candy. He’s—it’s almost always a “he”—generally overlooked as a character that fans will root for and is never the protagonist’s best-choice, endgame love interest; that’s a spot typically reserved for the idiosyncratic, brooding types. (You know the ones.) The hot jock has no academic standing or working knowledge of pop culture, and he might turn out to be offensively boring or even villainous, once you get past the strong jawline and fantastic hair.
However, back in April 2020, our first nascent month into the pandemic, Netflix gifted us with Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet): beaded-bracelet fan, star swimmer, and owner of a lipstick-red Jeep. By the end of the pilot, he not only cemented himself as one-third of Never Have I Ever’s series-defining love triangle, but also as our surprising new fave.
As it turns out, everybody loves Paxton. As the series progresses, characters mention that this sweet stud is the subject of three separate fan-run tumblrs; he had a childhood romance with Kaia Gerber at summer camp (Austin Butler, who?); and the female staff in the school cafeteria named a dessert after him. He’s the kind of high school popular kid that, as protagonist Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) says at one point, could almost count as a celebrity hall pass if you were lucky enough to hook up with him.
And it’s easy to see why so many would kill to do just that. Paxton moves through the hallways of Sherman Oaks High with the gait of an old-school matinee idol. He’s got great eye contact, thanks to some killer lashes, but he’s equally proficient with beguiling, far-off expressions, like he’s remembering a particularly sick sunset or a well-timed kiss. The fits are always right (do the kids still say that?)—he can rock a pair of well-fitting jeans, and his hoodies look super clean. He doesn’t say a lot, but he is always straightforward, and his SoCal timbre is extremely calming. Even when you think he’s being kind of a fuckboy, he’ll use his lunch period to do an apology tour of all the girls he has wronged in the past. Paxton will sweep you off your feet at prom, even though he told you he wasn’t coming.
There’s something to be said for a guy who learns from his mistakes and rectifies them in a public forum. It’s refreshing, and downright subversive, to see this kind of teen guy be a genuinely good person—Paxton helping out Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) with her flirting game was a season 3 highlight—when they look like the spiritual successor of a mid-2010s Zac Efron and mid-2010s Channing Tatum. Conventionally attractive, popular kids on TV don’t owe us nice!
Instead of leaning into the stereotype for the sake of the joke, Never Have I Ever manages to make Paxton three dimensional without forsaking the himbo-with-a-heart-of-gold vibe we’ve come to love. It’s the layers of hotness that make him so compelling: Paxton has a great relationship with his family, despite being a teen dude. And eventually, after Devi inspires him (so romantic), he wants to finally get good enough grades in school to get into college. But he can also remove his shirt in one fell-swoop like a sexy magic trick and carry you to safety like a delicate bird.
It helps, too, that Darren Barnet is so damn delightful in the role. He brings an easy, lived-in warmth to a character that could otherwise come across as otherworldly. And thankfully, he’s got a keen sense of comedic timing. What Paxton says might not be profound; it may even seem low-key offensive if you’re on the unpleasant end of the high school hierarchy chart. But his delivery is so sincere that it’s difficult not to be charmed. For example, his line read of “Wow, your body looks so good in that oversized t-shirt” in the Season 1 episode “Never Have I Ever…had sex with Paxton Hall-Yoshida” is masterful, telling you exactly who this character is. Not to mention that it’s the kind of compliment those of us who regularly alternate between daytime and night-time pajamas could only dream of receiving from a real-life crush. Especially one as foxy as Paxton.
The thirst for Paxton has been very real off-screen, too. Search his name on Twitter, and you’ll find no end of hilarious, lust-fueled tweets. The Paxton Hall-Yoshida TikTok hashtag has been viewed over 900 million times, and shirtless clips or that one scene where he showed up in Devi’s bedroom completely rain-soaked provide most of the video content. Even the Never Have I Ever Instagram page couldn’t resist making a sparkle-filtered Paxton fan-edit.
In a recent interview with InStyle, Barnet weighed in on the thirsty discourse, musing "I'm not going to sit here and be like, 'Oh, poor me, people are sexualizing me.’ I'm OK with it right now. It's fun.” Like, we were doing it anyway Darren, but we appreciate your consent. It’s also worth noting, for viewers-of-a-certain-age whose experience fancying Mr. H-Y mirrored that of this horny, but conflicted TikTok user, that Barnet is an adult man in his 30s playing younger—the teen drama tradition.
During NHIE’s season 3 finale, we learn that, unsurprisingly, Paxton’s yearbook superlative is “hotness”, as in, “most likely to succeed at: hotness.” Galvanized, but still very much on brand during his heartfelt graduation speech, he urges his classmates (and us at home) to not let labels define you, all the while being totally chill with crowd members yelling “I’m in love with you!” as he’s talking.
The most beloved dream boys in the teen-entertainment pantheon, like your Dylan McKays, your Jess Marianos, your Ryan Atwoods—whose DNA can be found in more recent avatars like Jughead Jones (Riverdale) and Marcus Baker (Ginny and Georgia)—would not win a peer vote to be class speaker. They’re far too much of an outsider for that. Nor would they entertain a world where one of their defining characteristics was attractiveness; they’ve read Kerouac and know who Bob Dylan is, for goodness sake.
Like a lot of millennials, those boys provided my sexual awakening as I was coming of age in the early aughts. The archetype was popular not only because they were good-looking in a way that maybe seemed attainable for us normies, but because we were naive enough to find their unpredictable, on-the-right-side-of-dangerous aura exciting and imagined their bleeding edge of cool persona might make us cooler by association.
But I don’t have the energy to deal with some leather-jacketed-volatile family-relationships-aloof-and-a-bit-mean-but-in-a-hot-way BS anymore. I’m tired. We’re all tired (see: the aforementioned global pandemic). I’ve been watching teen dramas for the better part of two decades, and now, all I want from a male lead is simplicity. I want an uncomplicated pretty-boy, who can give cute chemistry and go through the occasional small-stakes character growth. In a world where incels are still given a platform, even a whiff of toxic masculinity on screen feels too much to bear right now. To borrow a line from our boy, Paxton, “I want something that’s easy and fun and doesn’t make my brain hurt.”
Thankfully, Paxton is far from the only hot, surprisingly thoughtful popular guy out there these days. Give me Steve Harrington firmly in his Mom era on Stranger Things. Give me Peter Kavinsky in To All The Boys… making out in hot tubs. Give me The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Jeremiah Fisher, blissfully unaware of his mother’s terminal illness, who just wants to party at the beach. But most of all, give me the Paxton-living-his-life-at-Arizona-State-University spin-off series we surely deserve. I think we’re finally about to see it: justice for the hot jock.
