By Christine Westwood
In the mid-1990s producer Amy B Harris had the great instinct to back the runaway hit TV series Sex and the City. The show’s style and values may seem dated now but at the time it was a frank and revolutionary look at modern women’s real concerns about friendship, sexuality and relationships.
Fast forward to 2020 and Harris has once more put her name behind a series concerning the issues contemporary women face, in this case a group of teenage girls. The Wilds, Amazon’s first YA production, offers a perspective on the various traumas suffered by a group of girls who meet on a flight headed for a self empowerment retreat. Each in their own way, these young females are casualties of modern day society.
There are obvious parallels with Lost, the series that inspired writer and creator Sarah Streicher (whose previous success was writing 13 episodes of Emmy nominated action crime drama Daredevil) to pitch her vision for the story to Harris. Fun fact – the writers room for The Wilds drew on another TV series from the 1990s for specific tonal ideas, My So Called Life starring a young Claire Danes and Jared Leto with a script that was remarkable for capturing honest reflection of teens negotiating coming of age. Harris has also cited Buffy the Vampire Slayer “because of how it talked about the funny that is inside difficult scary stories.”
The life and death stakes are set high in The Wilds as, just like Lost, there is a plane crash that maroons its characters far from civilisation, but it is the depth of writing and stellar performances that elevate the ten-part series.
Filmed in New Zealand on soundstages in Auckland and the tropical west coast of North Island, complete with black sand beaches, the production values are to be applauded. The island location almost features as another character, so it was heartening to see attention to detail that matched and supported the gutsy performances by the stranded girls.
There are flashbacks, framed by the device of the girls relating their version of events to an FBI agent and a trauma counsellor, after their eventual rescue. In the process, the girls’ individual back stories are revealed episode by episode, beginning with the bookish Leah (Sarah Pidgeon), who is still obsessing about her brief affair with an older man.
Without giving away spoilers, the FBI is trying to piece together evidence of a mysterious, possibly sinister, plot involving social experimentation.
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The character at the heart of this theme is the retreat organiser Gretchen, played by Rachel Griffiths in a pitch perfect take that holds the ambiguous centre of the story themes.
Griffiths’ success in her first directorial role Ride Like a Girl reflected her feminist sensibilities and she has often voiced her frustration at the lack of female heroes in inspiring stories. In an interview for Indiewire to publicise The Wilds, she said: “There’s something wrong when the figure you most identify with when you’re 12 — in terms of thoughts, feelings and ideas — is Anne Frank… There’s a fucking problem that you’re a Catholic girl in Melbourne and you have to go to Anne Frank to find a view of a girl wrestling with the huge questions of humanity, fear, and anxiety.
“Adolescence has been viewed through a male lens, reduced and sexualised… Gretchen is an absolutely radical feminist theoretician who is wanting to prove — in a much more real world setting — ideas about how women organise themselves.”
Other Australians involved in the series include director/producer John Polson who helms three of the episodes. Polson originally made his mark as an actor, including The Sum of Us, and appears in The Dry with Eric Bana.
West Australian actress Shannon Berry (Offspring) plays the belligerent Dot. Other, American cast members include Reign Edwards as the moody Rachel and Helena Howard as her sister Nora; Jenna Clause as the timid Martha and Erana James as rebel with a cause Toni. Despite these thumbnail descriptors, what’s nice is that you can’t encapsulate the girls simply as types, and as you uncover their back stories, the more comprehensively human they become.
For example, Christian cheerleader Shelby (Mia Healey) is a revelation as the layers of her story peel away.
It’s a masterclass in fully fleshed out characterisation and all of the actors rise to the challenge. The point made at the outset is a little too obvious, as Leah says that escaping death in a plane crash is one thing, “but being a teenage girl in normalised America? That was the real living hell.”
The theme of modern life trauma for teenage girls is handled intelligently, going beyond tropes of troubled teens with eating disorders or relationship angst. Though the social media pressure and food issues are represented, like the character of Rachel, an elite diver who starves and pushes herself to achieve perfection, The Wilds is a far more ambitious attempt to put more complex issues under the microscope.
Even without the social themes, viewers will be inspired by watching female physicality that doesn’t need a superhero costume to justify it.
Mindful of its teen audience, Amazon is cleverly using social platforms to promote the show, including a free pilot episode on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The promotion is slightly hampered by the decision to mask the unexpected twists that occur in the show, but it’s unavoidable if you want to protect ‘the reveal’. The series’ script has laid plenty of groundwork for future story lines, but time will tell if the girls of The Wild gather a large enough fan base to launch a second series.
The Wilds is streaming now on Prime Video.
