Love 101 series premiere recap: Troublemakers scheme to make their teachers fall in love

In Netflix’s new Turkish teen drama, Love 101, we’re introduced to four troublemakers and an honor student destined to become unlikely friends.

Love 101 is Netflix‘s new Turkish teen drama featuring a cast of troublemaking teenagers scheming to make their favorite teacher fall in love. The only reason the students want Professor Burcu to fall in love is so she’ll get married and cancel her relocation to another school.

Burcu is the only teacher standing between the teens and expulsion. With her gone, it would only be a matter of time before they got expelled and lost all hope of becoming high school graduates.

Meet the characters

The main characters of Love 101 are Kerem, Eda, Sinan, Osman, and Isik.

Kerem is the most volatile of the bunch. He tends toward violence. In the first episode alone, Kerem attacks a referee in the middle of a basketball match, bashes an amp on someone’s head, and starts a full-on brawl in the middle of the auditorium.

Eda appears to hook up with one of her teachers, although the show tries to play it off as if Eda seduced him. It’s surprising to see a plotline like that in 2020 since obviously Eda is a teenager and her teacher is a full-grown man who should have shut her down and not taken advantage. He does get fired, at least.

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Later, she then coaxes the boy in the sound booth to fetch her coffee so she can mess with the lights during the school’s debate competition. Eda kickstarts the brawl by throwing something at Kerem and instigating bad blood between the two schools.

Sinan is perhaps the most relaxed out of all of the students. He appears not to care about anything. He day drinks and sleeps most of the time, and rarely does he show up on time. During the debate, it is his flash that ignites a flame that almost burns down the school.

Osman rounds out the troublemakers. By comparison to the others, he’s not that bad. All he does in the first episode is to take bets from the students about who will win the debate.

That said, with all four of them doing their darndest to wreak havoc, they ruin the debate and get the school disqualified from future competitions. The teachers want to expel all of them, but they need a unanimous vote to do it. Only Miss Burcu disagrees with expelling them.

The only problem is, Burcu receives news her relocation order to her dream location has been accepted, meaning she can leave Istanbul High behind. If Burcu goes, then the principal will quickly expel the unruly students.

Hence why Eda, Sinan, Osman, and Kerem need the help of top honor student, Isik, who also happens to be in love with the idea of love.

They corner her and convince her to help them in their plain to make Burcu fall in love with the new teacher, Mr. Kemal.

A look into the future

The series is set primarily in 1998, but each episode features present-day vignettes so we can learn more about who these characters will become in the future.

Throughout the episode, we see a blonde woman at what appears to be Sinan’s old house. She offers some narration to the episode, saying it’s strange to remember a time when the group wasn’t close friends.

I’m pretty confident the woman is Isik. At the end of the first hour, she writes a letter to her old friends, asking them to meet her at the house they all used to hang out before it’s gone. We see several faceless people receive their messages, and it looks like Eda has a big family in the future, while at least one person is in jail.

What did you think of the first episode? Are you planning to watch the rest of Love 101’s first season? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Season 1 of Love 101 is now available to stream on Netflix.