The To Do List (2013)
Directed by Maggie Carey
No — The To Do List is not especially woke, scoring 21 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Maggie Carey's 1993-set comedy arrives with a premise engineered to raise eyebrows and a follow-through content to merely shrug.
Consciousness Markers
A female writer-director centers a teenage girl's sexual agency and self-directed 'to do list,' framing sex as her own choice; critics debated whether this empowerment is genuine or superficial.
The ensemble includes Aubrey Plaza (Puerto Rican descent), Donald Glover, and Alia Shawkat, but the cast is predominantly white and diversity is incidental rather than a stated aim.
The film is a raunchy sex comedy that prioritizes gags over moralizing, with only faint empowerment messaging rather than direct lecturing.
Race is never a theme; the film is a white-suburban coming-of-age comedy with no racial commentary.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
No environmental or climate content whatsoever.
No economic critique or class commentary; the setting is comfortable suburban Boise.
Bodies are treated as objects of raunchy comedy rather than through a body-positivity lens.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
The 1993 setting is nostalgic backdrop, not a revisionist reframing of history.
Why it received this score
Maggie Carey's 1993-set comedy arrives with a premise engineered to raise eyebrows and a follow-through content to merely shrug. Brandy Klark, valedictorian and social disaster, decides that her virginity is a problem to be solved by Labor Day, so she drafts a numbered itinerary of sexual acts and works through it like a term paper. That a woman wrote and directed this, and that Aubrey Plaza plays Brandy as a person making a choice instead of a punchline, gives the material a faint pulse of self-determination. Critics at the time split on whether this constituted genuine empowerment or a fig leaf over raunch, and both camps were correct. The film grants its heroine agency and then spends ninety minutes watching her eat pool waste for a laugh.
The supporting ensemble is pleasant and incidental. Donald Glover and Alia Shawkat appear, do their jobs, and are never asked to comment on their own presence, which is the correct approach and also the entire extent of the film's engagement with diversity. Race does not exist here. Neither does class, climate, queerness, or any interior life that cannot be resolved with a gag about a list. The suburban Boise setting is a comfortable backdrop, not a subject. Bodies are props for gross-out comedy, and the 1990s are deployed as costume and soundtrack, not as history to be reconsidered. What remains is a sex comedy that mostly wants to be dirty, with a thin ribbon of self-possession running through it.
That ribbon is real, if frayed. Brandy's choices are her own, the film says so plainly, and it declines to sermonize about them. The messaging stays light enough to be missed, which is a mercy. The result is a comedy of modest ambition and uneven execution, notable chiefly for letting a teenage girl pursue pleasure on her own terms while everyone around her behaves worse. It does not lecture. It does not enlighten. It simply proceeds, and then ends, and we are left to classify it.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Feeling pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college, Brandy Klark makes a list of things to accomplish before hitting campus in the fall.
Questions about The To Do List
Is The To Do List woke?
No — The To Do List is not especially woke, scoring 21 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does The To Do List have any woke elements?
2 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Feminist Agenda (55) and Representation Casting (35). On Feminist Agenda: A female writer-director centers a teenage girl's sexual agency and self-directed 'to do list,' framing sex as her own choice; critics debated whether this empowerment is genuine or superficial.
How does The To Do List compare to other 2013 movies?
It ranks #57 of the 274 films from 2013 we've scored; their average is 14. The wokest is Belle (76).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.