A party of schoolgirls wash up on a deserted island with a seemingly dangerous side, in a series that marries coming-of-age drama with apocalyptic mystery
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 (Sarah Pidgeon), who has just broken up with her boyfriend and says things to her parents like: “Please don’t refer to my emotional devastation as ‘a funk’.” Then there is Rachel (Reign Edwards), sulking aggressively about something and pulling her sister Nora (Helena Howard) down with her, bellicose Dot (Shannon Berry), permanently furious class-and-every-other-kind-of-warrior Toni (Erana James) and her timid friend Martha (Jenna Clause), and smug hot girl Fatin (Sophia Ali). Lightening the mood of the show, if not the passengers on the plane to Hawaii, are pathologically peppy Texan Shelby (Mia Healey) and overenthusiastic chatterbox Jeanette (Chi Nguyen).