Stream It Or Skip It?

Quiet In Class is a 3-part docuseries about how a predator was allowed to continue working at the Internationella Engelska Skolan (International English School) in Karlstad, Sweden, despite multiple warnings given to school administrators from 2017 to 2023. The unnamed school employee, in the position of “youth recreational director,” started posting pictures of students, taken surreptitiously, to adult sites in 2015. In total, over 160 students were victims of the youth director’s abuse.

Opening Shot: “2017. THE FIRST WARNING.” We see scenes of what looks like the office of a school principal.

The Gist: The producers of the docuseries speak to a number of former students, all female, who discuss their personal experiences with the youth director, who in most cases made them feel uncomfortable via his interactions with them and the sense that he was looking at the teens and pre-teens in a sexual way. Multiple students took their issues with the youth director to school administrators, either in writing or in person, but nothing came of their reports.

In addition to the students and some of the administration — the filmmakers play phone calls of administrators who didn’t participate in formal interviews — an outsider who saw the adult site and the photos posted and managed to sleuth his way to the youth director is interviewed. His identity is kept secret,

The whistleblower seemed to thrill in the hunt; after he found out about who and where these photos were being taken — and the fact that there were videos posted where the perpetrator would perform sexual acts with some of the pictures — he emailed the local newspaper and the school principal, to no avail. The reasons why this whistleblower was so thrilled outing this predator is that he knows a lot about what he was thinking.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Quiet In Class feels like it’s the opposite of Dateline‘s old “To Catch A Predator” series.

Our Take: Quiet In Class feels strangely exploitative for a docuseries about such a sensitive topic. The series’ producers seem to revel in showing the activities of the youth director via reenactments, constantly showing an actor playing the youth director from the back, sneaking pictures of female students or talking to other female students and making them uncomfortable.

The docuseries also seems to stretch out the nature of why the whistleblower was doing what he was doing, and why he seemed to be inappropriately excited by the prospect. Throughout the first episode, we hear a disguised voice talk about the thought process of a predator like the youth director, but soon find out that the whistleblower and the disguised-voice predator were one in the same person.

Yes, it’s a dramatic reveal. But to what end? There’s this random person that happened upon an adult site that showed pictures of teen and preteen girls who seems to get off on the thrill of outing this guy. But it all seemed strange. Why is he anonymous? And why the determination to out this guy — even getting in touch with him personally?

It feels like it’s supposed to be a twist to the story, but in reality it’s a small detail that is incidental to what’s the bigger issue: The fact that the IES school ignored multiple warnings over a number of years. We’d rather see more examination of that than hearing from this predator-turned-whistleblower.

Sex and Skin: None, thankfully. It’s bad enough that we get glimpses of the adult site the predator used to post the pictures of the students.

Parting Shot: We find out that the whistleblower and “entrepreneur” that talked about running his own adult site with photos of teenagers are the same person.

Sleeper Star: This is for all the women who told their stories about the youth director to the show’s producers.

Most Pilot-y Line: The reenactments with an actor playing the youth director creeped us out. There were far too many reenactment scenes on the series in general, but the ones with the youth director just felt wrong for some reason.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While it presents its story in a somewhat exploitative and salacious manner, Quiet In Class is still worth watching because of how brave the women who were preyed upon speak out and finding out about the stunning way the school ignored the students who reported the predator who worked there.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.