There is an exercise in family thinking that you can do after reading William Golding lord of the flies at school for the first time. What would be different, some serious teacher asks, if they were girls on the island instead of boys?
We all know the supposed answer: the girls would get along very well, braid each other’s hair and would not beat anyone until death. A little piece of paradise where everyone sings along with a ukelele made of logs and quotes a lot about Kamala Harris, or whatever.
That, or they would take everything Mean Girls-Be malicious and act well while calling each other island sluts in harsh whispers behind the palm trees. Because, women, right?
what The Wilds, a new 10-episode drama series for young adults from Amazon Studios, it turns out that none of the assumptions are correct. If women and girls tend to do well or maintain order, it is only because they have been taught to keep their own trauma deep down, so that it cannot be inflicted on anyone else. But when launched into uncharted territory like a desert island after a plane crash, the trauma spreads.
The basic premise is that a group of teenage girls are stranded on an island after what appears at first to be a plane crash. We quickly learned that it is all a set-up, a maneuver by a poor researcher to prove a point. But girls – at least most of them – don’t know that. Together, they need to stay alive with minimal supplies and many interpersonal conflicts.
The cast of The Wilds was praised for its diversity, but it is the girls’ stories, along with their identities, that really guide this home. There is Martha Blackburn, a Native American girl in denial of previous abuse, played beautifully by Jenna Clause, a new face from the Six Nations reserve in Ontario, Canada. Her friend, Toni, is a queer teenager in the adoption system with anger issues, played by Maori actor Erana James. There is Fatin (Sophia Ali), the spoiled, rich Muslim girl who catches her father cheating, but carries the weight of guilt for exposing him. Dot (Shannon Berry), the group’s survivor, was forced to grow up very fast taking care of her sick father, which we learned in an episode that will absolutely make you cry. Shelby (Mia Healey) is a Christian girl from Texas who has not left home and whose internalized anti-LGBTQ prejudice, caused by her conservative parents, does not only harm herself. And Leah’s (Sarah Pidgeon) obsessive personality and her relationship with a very old author fill her with sadness. Reign Edwards plays Rachel, an athlete who develops an eating disorder as a result of pressure to perform, while her twin sister, Nora (Helena Howard), is struggling with the suicide of her first love.
On the island, isolated only from each other and from nature, these traumas explode from any varnish that each girl was using to contain them. They shoot, cry, collapse, but ultimately they survive. Because that’s what teenagers should be doing. Is on The Wilds, they happily manage to do this in the absence of boys and men, at least on the island itself.
None of the girls’ backstory looks too wild for TV. Each talks about the tragically mundane trauma of simply being a young woman moving around the world. Although the program hasn’t made the biggest impact on pop culture conversations in general, it has been loved online by the young people who watch it. Inside memes and posts on Tumblr, observers managed to choose and worship the characters they most identify with and the show contributed to that in your own social media blitz, as with playlists for each character. The show knows what it is doing and does it well.
Of course, there is also a cheese factor. While it is better than a typical teen CW soap opera, there are still times when drama takes precedence over survival in a way that borders on rage. Like when the group is out of food and starving, Toni and Shelby find a lychee tree full of fresh fruit, but instead of bringing the reward back to the group, they connect and spend the night tucked away under saved provisions. lives. Sure, it made my heart ache, but come on, kids, people are hungry! Or early on, when Leah hears a cell phone ringing the body of her dead partner, she uses it to call her scary ex-boyfriend instead of literally anyone else. But, hey, this is TV, right?
Furthermore, all of this is set against the backdrop of the secret experiment by mentor Gretchen Klein (Rachel Griffiths), who put them on this island to prove that having women in charge would create a superior society. I would like to think that this is some kind of comment on how white feminism, in the style of Sheryl Sandberg, ignores the intersectoral experiences and conflicts of real women, but this is probably too generous.
In general, The Wilds speaks to the mourning of emerging femininity in a way that strikes a delicate balance between a Degrassispecial forget after school and The 100-fantasy-level TV. The girls were placed in extraordinary circumstances, but they are so human that everything seems real. ●