If you want to warn your teen away from sex, one good way is to tell them to watch “The Nine Lives of Chloe King,” premiering tonight on ABC Family.
Here, we have celibacy as a metaphor for not just clean living, but living in general.
The show begins on the day that Chloe King (Skyler Samuels) turns 16, when she also starts developing superpowers along with weird designs on her back.
We learn that Chloe is from an ancient goddess race and, now that she has come of age, she has begun “processing” into a half-goddess herself.
Unbeknownst to her, she is actually from the ancient race of Mai — descendants of the Egyptian goddess Bastet who have been hunted by human assassins for thousands of years.
And, if that’s not enough for any 16-year-old to absorb, she learns from two Mai kids in school who have also “processed” that if she so much as kisses a human boy, he will die — although she will continue to live.
In fact, Chloe is more than your everyday run-of-the-mill Mai. Chloe is the “Uniter” — destined to be the one to reunite humans with gods — and, as such, has nine lives. Well, eight, since she loses one of them in the first 60 seconds of the show.
Chloe has two best (human) friends, Paul (Ki Hong Lee) and Amy (Grace Phipps), who are dumbfounded by Chloe’s power predicament, but go along for the ride.
Luckily, students Alek (Benjamin Stone) and Jasmine (Alyssa Diaz) are fully processed Mai, and are ready, willing and able to help, too — even though they each have only one life to give.
There are allegories galore — from celibacy to puberty (all that body “processing”), alienation and, yes, teen angst of the “what the heck is that thing on my back?” variety.
Think “Teen Wolf” for girls.