Why “The Wilds” Is my Favorite Pandemic TV Show
Why “The Wilds” Is my Favorite Pandemic TV Show
“The Wilds” is the kind of show that grabbed me in the first five minutes. Here’s why I love it.
Some spoilers for “The Wilds” season 1, but I decided not to give anything major away because it’s really important to me that you watch it!
“The Wilds” is the kind of show that grabbed me in the first five minutes. The series, which released its second season in May, could be described as “Lost” meets “Pretty Little Liars” – it’s about a group of teenage girls from different backgrounds on their way to a “retreat” who get deserted on a tropical island after a plane crash. But there’s so much more to it, not just in the plot twists and commentary but in the character development, and the way it immediately forces deep empathy with each of the seven protagonists who find themselves stuck together on the island. It does so while, especially in the first season, flouting stereotypes and expectations, both in terms of plot and characters. The cinematography, scenery, and music are also pitch-perfect. It just might be my favorite show I’ve watched during the pandemic–which might also have to do with the fact that in December 2020 we were the opposite of stranded on a tropical island together and in fact trapped inside our New York City apartments in a freezing winter.
In the first 30 seconds of “The Wilds,” we meet Leah, who’s just been rescued, undergoing medical examination, in some sort of a bunker. She’s in an interview with a psychiatrist and his assistant, who deliver comforting platitudes, telling Leah there is nothing to fear, and that they just want to know what happened. They are effusively apologetic, telling Leah they can’t imagine the kind of trauma she’s been through.
Leah’s response, delivered as voiceover over clips of the protagonists and the propulsive, ethereal rhythm of French actress-singer Charlotte Gainsbourg’s “Deadly Valentine,” blew me away. “Yeah, there was trauma,” she begins.
“But what was so fucking great about the lives we left behind? Because here’s what I remember about all of that. I remember not being enough. I remember wanting to be more. I remember the dark moods, the violent moods, moods that nobody had any patience for. And then there was the brutal social scene, which some girls could just glide through like they belonged everywhere. And there you were, just trying to belong somewhere. I remember the ridiculous expectations they had for us. Like, we were supposed to be these golden gods 24-7. I remember the responsibilities, heavy burdens meant for adults forced on us before our time. Responsibilities that made you think, ‘Yeah, this is definitely fucking with my healthy development right now.’”
And don’t get me started on the impossible problem of sex. If you were terrified of it, which you had every reason to be, you'd be deemed a frigid chastity bitch. But if you were somehow unafraid, like if it was just naturally your thing, then God help you. The world is a dangerous place for a sexually evolved girl. And on top of all that, there was this new feeling, this sick, ugly feeling, of wanting to love and to be loved back, which never ends well.
So if we’re talking about what happened out there, then yeah, there was trauma. But being a teenage girl in normal-ass America, that was the real living hell.”
As Leah speaks, we see Martha, sitting on her bed scrolling through Instagram, liking inspirational messages; we see Toni, a waitress, flipping a table after her customers leave her a $0 tip for her “crappy attitude;” we see a gaggle of prep school girls walk past Nora, reading alone, observing them; we see her sister, Rachel, jumping off the diving board and performing an acrobatic high dive as her coach scolds her; we see Jeanette, prepping crab in a restaurant kitchen; we see Dot, smoking a cigarette before going inside to dress her bedridden fathers’ tracheostomy; we see Shelby, in a swimsuit, as her boyfriend blow dries her spray tan. When his hands stray, she flicks him away; we see Fatin dancing seductively on a boy’s bed; and then we finally see Leah herself, crying in a dark room, with a text that reads “Don’t contact me again.”
This is a show that from the first moments makes clear it understands what it’s like to be a teenage girl. And that’s the focus of its first season, where we eventually learn that the girls are part of an experiment devised by psychiatrist Gretchen Klein, who is running the “retreat” their parents signed them up for. “The Wilds” also has important representation: of the eight girls who land on the island, there are “queer, Black, Indigenous, and Persian characters, who also come from various class backgrounds,” writes The Advocate’s Tracy Gilchrist around the time of the show’s premiere. And while some of the characters could on first glance be construed as stereotypes, “The Wilds” sets to work breaking them down the moment they start to look a bit too predictable.
Toni, played by Erana James, and my personal favorite character, at first seems to cleave to the stereotype of the “angry lesbian,” but her character quickly goes far beyond that trope. Toni comes to the “retreat” with her friend Martha, who she grew up with on an Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota. The fact that there are two Indigenous characters (and actors– Clause is Cayuga Nation Wolf Clan from Sixth Nation Ontario herself and James is half-Maori) means the show can sidestep overly-tokenizing. Martha is a gentle animal-lover involved in traditional dance on the reservation where she lives, which if done clumsily could look a bit essentializing, but Toni, who is in foster care, doesn’t feel connected to Indigenous culture and gently makes fun of Martha, calling jingle dancing “too res” for her in Martha’s flashback episode, directed by Navajo filmmaker Sydney Freeland, one of the creators behind “Reservation Dogs.”
By showing two Indigenous characters who share a cultural background but not necessarily the same relationship to it, the show avoids homogenizing their separate experiences both of being Indigenous and what it means to them. This reminds me of an interview I read years ago with Melissa Fumero of “Brooklyn 99” about how when she auditioned for the show after Stephanie Beatriz had been cast as Rosa Diaz, she doubted she’d get the part, because “there can only be one” Latina in a cast–in other words, Hollywood only allows one character per minority in a show run by white people, pretty much the definition of “token Black friend” if I ever heard it. But then both were cast, which broke some boundaries for network TV at the time, not even a decade ago. “It was something that my [costar] Stephanie [Beatriz] and I couldn't believe — that they hired two Latinas. At the time, that never happened. We thought one of us was going to get fired, for sure,” Fumero told Us Magazine in 2017.
In “The Wilds,” after the shock of the plane crash, dynamics on the island quickly become apparent. To Toni’s annoyance and jealousy, Martha has gravitated towards Shelby, a conservative Christian youth pastor and pageant girl from Texas. Shelby, too, is more than she appears, and it’s fascinating to peel back the layers when we get to her flashback episode–which, without giving anything major away–is pretty heart-wrenching.
The girls are part of Gretchen Klein’s “Dawn of Eve” group, an experiment of sorts that purports to prove that the experience will help them group into themselves and show their dominance over men. Of course, it’s clearly also torturing them, and Klein is more “mad scientist” than revolutionary feminist (in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn she is a TERF). In the second season, we’re introduced to her “control group” of boys on a separate island, which reflects both a misunderstanding of what a “control group” means, as well as the fact that the show “doesn’t need the boys,” as Valerie Anne concludes in her review in Autostraddle. Or, more amusingly, “Overall the season… can be summed up as: who asked for this? Who watched Season 1 and was like, ‘This is great, what if we had less of it and more of something completely brand new?’” It’s true that Season 2 is flawed, and dilutes the premise of the show (“girls island vs. boys island” sounds like an early-aughts reality show.)
However, some of its messages are muddled, others feel rather brave, and the show continues to excel at character development. It’s darker than the first season, perhaps because it’s showcasing, as Gretchen hopes to prove, “bad male behavior” at its pinnacle. In some places, it’s a bit overwrought and the dialogue is clunkier (I.e., “you give him too much real estate in your head and your heart”). Importantly, having to explain about the boys’ island also makes the show a harder sell to my peers, especially in a media landscape where for a month it seemed no one would stop talking about “Yellowjackets,” which has a similar premise and was extremely popular, while “The Wilds” fell completely under the radar. I still loved it overall, even with the addition of the boys, so much that I watched the whole show again twice in two weeks. (As you may have noticed, things have been bleak beyond words recently, so you’ll forgive me for using “The Wilds” as my only source of serotonin these days). There are moments from it that have haunted me since I watched.
If you watched, or this post convinces you to watch, I *beg you* to let me know what you think, as I could discuss for many more hours.
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