Credit:
Matt Klitscher/Amazon Studios
A drama about teen girls fighting to survive after their plane crashes on a deserted island? No thanks — 2020 is dark enough. But a drama about a group of teen girls lured into a fempowerment retreat by an eccentric academic who uses words like "gynotopia"? Yes, please,
The Wilds. Inject that nonsense right into my weary eyeballs.
Created by Sarah Streicher (
The Wilds begins in the present — an injured young woman named Leah (Sarah Pidgeon) is interviewed by two official-looking investigators (Troy Winbush and David Sullivan) — before flashing back to the events that led to her middle-of-nowhere marooning with seven other young women. (Ah, the present-day debrief as framing device — the cause of, and solution to, so many TV storytelling problems.) The first five minutes of the premiere, a meet-the-characters montage, tells us exactly what to expect from this survivalist drama, via Leah's snarky-earnest voice-over: "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." This is a show about adolescents, not subtlety.