Author Lauren Oliver adapts her own YA novel Panic for a 10-episode Amazon series, which has teenagers competing in deadly dares built around their deepest fears, in hopes of winning a cash prize. The teens’ story arc is compelling, but to widen the show, Oliver added a police-procedural subplot and many adult characters, which dilute the danger, romance, and action. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.
The Wilds, while
Advertisement
Amazon’s latest teen adventure series,
Panic, succeeds through the twists of the game and the strength of Olivia Welch’s multifaceted portrayal of Heather, our protagonist who’s both dream girl and tomboy. Based on Lauren Oliver’s YA novel and developed by the author,
Panic is so named for an underground game that takes place in the unappealing hamlet of Carp, Texas, which even the area’s well-off residents are dying to escape. And winning the game of Panic may be the ticket: Every summer, the graduating high school seniors get a chance to compete, which involves a lot of trumped-up yet terrifying dares, like crossing a highway blindfolded, being buried alive in a coffin, or spending the night in an abandoned, reportedly haunted house. It’s not every fictional series that has a “don’t try this at home” disclaimer attached.
The stakes for the characters in Panic are sky high â literally life and death, as in a second episode challenge where contestants traverse a rickety steel beam between two grain towers stories above a crowd of their peers. But Panicâs 45-minute episodes, also written by Oliver, barely lift above a dramatic flatline. The series leans heavily on teen adrenaline but offers frustratingly few clues as to why itâs applied to Panic, whoâs coercing them, or why no one simply spills the beans. High-schoolers gather each summer to watch their friends skirt death by inches for ⦠what, exactly? Itâs a zombie of a series â all the parts of a dystopian-adjacent, horny teen YA thriller without a heartbeat of central mystery.
Amazon’s ‘Panic’: TV Review Inkoo Kang
Hunger Games-inspired YA mystery-thriller
Panic. Named after an annual tradition in which the recent high-school grads of a small Texas town compete in a risky game that resulted in the deaths of two players the previous year, the series finally lets us feel the weight of the decision to participate in the summer-long tournament at the end of the fourth episode.
“We’re both trash,” declares bad boy Ray (Ray Nicholson) to good girl Heather (Olivia Welch), citing their broken families and the dirty or pitiful looks the teens get around town. “I don’t think good things are going to happen to me anymore,” he sighs not as long as he stays in Cary. The Panic game yields a winner-take-all cash prize of just $50,000 not enough for the rich, college-bound kids to gamble on their very lives by, say, playing Russian Roulette or walking across a highway blindfolded, but enough to inspire dreams of moving away and