Amazon Prime Video s survival coming-of-age drama The Wilds deals with the most terrifying business of all: being a teenage girl. Hailed as
Lord of the Flies meets
Mean Girls, the series focuses on a group of teens stranded on a deserted island as part of a controversial experiment. Sent off to what they believe will be a luxury Hawaiian all-female retreat, eight girls from different backgrounds will need to cooperate in order to survive after their plane crashes.
Native American, fiery and openly gay basketball player Toni (Erana James) almost immediately clashes with religious Shelby (Mia Healey). The latter is an impossibly peppy Texan beauty queen. Her accepting approach, however, wavers when confronted with queerness. Bothered by Toni s out-and-proud attitude, the closeted pageant star can no longer hide her discomfort. When the lesbian athlete simulates oral sex on a mussel to entertain the group in Day Twelve, Shelby cracks.
'The Wilds' Boss on Crafting a Controversial Island Experiment and Plans for Season 2 lmtonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lmtonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Wilds review – Lost meets Mean Girls in Amazon s teen thriller Lucy Mangan
It’s Lost for teens. It’s Lord of the Flies with girls. It’s the Breakfast Club with an apocalyptic twist. It’s Mean Girls meets Pretty Little Liars meets The Society meets all those post-Twilight, sub-Buffy, Gen Z vampire programmes you never quite caught the names of, but without – so far – the vampires. It’s Amazon Prime’s first YA-offering-not-based-on-an-existing-intellectual-property, it’s a 10-part series called The Wilds and resistance is futile.
Though, in all fairness, it may not feel like that immediately. When we first meet the group of more or less disaffected 17-year-olds as they pile on to a chartered plane headed for an all-female retreat in Hawaii (named, for foreshadowing fans, The Dawn of Eve), well, my goodness – DON’T they just seem the most charmless group of mardy babies you could ever hope to meet. Foremost among them is bookish Leah (Sara
Amazon's 'The Wilds' Attempts Twisty Intrigue with Teen Girl 'Lord of the Flies' Meets 'Survivor': TV Review: lmtonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lmtonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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 survi