What happens when a plane full of teenage girls crashes (or “crashes”) on a remote tropical island, far from boys, cell service, and Instagram? Do they tear each other apart over jealousies, innuendo about each other’s sexual history, and access to Takis Fuego chips scavenged from their plane? Or do they steel themselves, organize into a sisterhood of Gen Z Amazons, and birth a new society from the literal and figurative wreckage of the old? And what if the whole scenario was a Robbers Cave-style social experiment run by a mad (social) scientist, who was expelled from the academy because her visionary methods were deemed unsound?
These are the questions posed by The Wilds, the stylish new YA thriller from showrunner Sarah Streicher that is now streaming on Amazon Prime. Part Lost, part Lord of the Flies, and part Truman Show, The Wilds mostly succeeds in creating something watchable by taking its over-the-top premise not unseriously and not too seriously, but just seriously enough.
The show opens as a sort of procedural. Leah (Sarah Pidgeon) is in an interview room with two detectives. Something sinister and possibly criminal has happened on an island, but we don’t know what, and after one of the detectives encourages her to open up about the trauma of whatever happened to her there, Leah delivers a monologue on what I at first worried would be the heavy-handed “point” of the show. “What was so f—ing great about the lives we left behind?” she asks. “If you’re talking about what happened out there, then yeah, there was trauma. But if you’re talking about being a teenage girl in normal-ass America, then that was the real living hell.”
What happened “out there,” it turns out, was that a chartered plane taking a group of troubled teenagers to a female-empowerment retreat in Hawaii crashed in the middle of the ocean, leaving the survivors — all the girls except for one, who, it is later revealed, was not like the others — washed up on a tiny tropical island, with nothing but Diet Coke and their wits to save them.
We’re introduced to the cast ensemble slowly. The police interviews become a device for getting to know each of the survivors — one girl per episode — and the action cuts between the interview room, events on the island, and flashbacks to the pre-crash life of each episode’s subject. All of them, as Leah suggests at the outset, are carrying some sort of “trauma” into the experience. Leah has recently been dumped by her 30-year-old novelist boyfriend, who discovered that she lied to him about her age. Rachel (Reign Edwards) is a competitive swimmer who developed bulimia after being told she doesn’t have a swimmer’s body. Dot (Shannon Berry) is an abrasive loner who, we learn, has spent her high school years dealing drugs to pay for her dying father’s medical treatment. Fatin (Sophia Ali) is a sexually precocious rich girl reeling from the harsh discipline of her immigrant mother and the serial infidelity of her father. And so on and so on.
It’s a bit of a tic in contemporary fiction (perhaps because of the influence of YA) to treat “trauma” as a master signifier, one weird trick for plumbing the depths of human psychology. The Wilds isn’t entirely innocent of this, but it doesn’t get too bogged down in it, either, thanks to its focus on the group dynamics that emerge on the island. Sure, there’s a bit of an “I’m not OK, you’re not OK, and that’s OK” element to the flashbacks. In most cases, a character’s outwardly repellent or selfish behavior on the island is revealed to be the product of deep psychic scars with which we’re meant to empathize — but only a bit. These are still people responsible for their actions, and when they do something awful, we understand but don’t necessarily forgive.
Some parts of the show are less successful. It’s fond of twists, and the big early one — that the teenagers’ plane crashed on purpose and that the retreat their parents signed them up for is actually a sort of extreme therapeutic wilderness camp run by girlboss Colonel Kurtz in order to “nourish” the girls “on a very holistic level” — is unwieldy and tends to sap the drama from whatever is happening on the island, since we know that at least some adults, even if slightly unhinged ones, are in the room. And as is often the case when teenage characters are written by adult writers, the dialogue can be cringey. When a teenage boy tells Leah that by “being the most normcore person here, you’ve lowkey turned the tables,” it’s hard to do anything but howl.
Still, and I found myself, despite myself and against my better judgment, liking this one. Is my brain being melted by the YA industrial complex? Perhaps. But The Wilds is a lot wilder and more fun than I expected, and at times, it was weirdly affecting, which is more than I can say of most TV.
Park MacDougald is Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
