There is a familiar mind exercise you can do after reading William Golding Lord of the Flies for the first time in school. What would be different, asks some serious teacher, if it was girls on the island instead of boys?
We all know the supposed answer: girls will get along, braid each other’s hair and not kill anyone. A little piece of paradise where everyone sings together to a ukulele made of driftwood and quotes Kamala Harris a lot, or whatever.
That, otherwise they get everything Mean girls-Style kittens and act nice while calling each other islands in loud whispers behind palm trees. Because women, right?
What The Wilds, a new teen series young adult drama series from Amazon Studios, is right that no suspicion is correct. If women and girls tend to act nicely or maintain order, it is only because they have been taught to stuff their own trauma deep inside where it can not be applied to anyone else. But when thrown after a plane crash in an area as unknown as a deserted island, the trauma flushes out.
The basic premise is that a group of teenage girls find themselves stranded on an island after a plane crash. We quickly realize that this is all a setup, a gimmick by a disgraced researcher to prove a point. But the girls – at least most of them – do not know. Together they must survive with minimal stock and many interpersonal conflicts.
The cast of The Wilds was praised for its diversity, but it is the girls’ stories along with their identity that really drive the house. There’s Martha Blackburn, a Native American girl in denial of past abuse, beautifully portrayed by Jenna Clause, a new face from the Six Nations Reservation in Ontario, Canada. Her friend, Toni, is a strange teenager in the foster care system with anger issues, portrayed by Maori actor Erana James. There is Fatin (Sophia Ali), the spoiled, wealthy Muslim girl who cheats on her father but bears the blame for exposing him. Dot (Shannon Berry), the survivor of the group, was forced to grow up too fast by caring for her sick father, which we learn about in an episode that will absolutely make you cry. Shelby (Mia Healey) is a Christian girl from Texas who is not out and whose installed anti-LGBTQ prejudice that her conservative parents bring does not only harm herself. And Leah (Sarah Pidgeon)’s obsessive personality and relationship with an overly old writer fills her with sadness. Reign Edwards plays Rachel, an athlete who develops an eating disorder due to the pressure to perform, while her twin, Nora (Helena Howard), struggles with the suicide of her first love.
On the island, isolated with each other and nature, these traumas explode from every veneer every girl uses to contain them. They sniff, they cry, they collapse, but in the end they survive. Because that’s what teenage girls need to do. And so on The Wilds, they can do it blissfully in the absence of boys and men, at least on the island itself.
None of the girls’ back stories feel for TV wild. Everyone is talking about the tragic everyday trauma of just a young woman moving in the world. Although the show did not make the biggest splash in the general pop culture conversation, the young women who watch it are popular online. In memes and Tumblr posts, viewers could do it choose from and worship the characters they mostly identify with, and the series played in it his own social media blitz, as with playlists for each character. The program knows what it’s doing, and it’s doing it well.
Of course, there is also a cheese factor. While it’s better than your average CW-type teen soap, there are still moments in which drama takes precedence over survival in a way that is furious. Like when the group has no more food and goes hungry, Toni and Shelby find a lychee tree full of fresh fruit, but instead of bringing the abundance back to the group, they turn on and sniff under life-saving food. Of course it hurt my strange heart, but come on, kids, people are hungry! Or early on when Leah hears a cell phone ringing at the corpse of their dead comrade, she uses it to call her whimsical ex-boyfriend instead of literally someone else. But hey, it’s TV, right?
On top of that, it’s all set against the backdrop of mastermind Gretchen Klein’s (Rachel Griffiths) mysterious experiment that put everyone on this island to prove that the management of women would create a superior society. I would like to think that it kind of comments on how white, Sheryl Sandberg-style feminism ignores the intersectional experiences and quarrels of real women, but it’s probably too generous.
In general, The Wilds speaks to the sadness of emerging womanhood in a way that strikes a fine balance between a Degras-esque after school special and The 100–shallow TV fantasy. The girls were thrown into extraordinary circumstances, but they are so human that it really feels. ●