Could you really resist a cult if a beloved celebrity was at the helm?
Hollywood has eagerly mined this premise amid the 2020s’ true crime boom, from Nicole Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers to The Weeknd in The Idol. Now Toni Collette is getting in on the fun, starring as the unnervingly smiley face of a school for troubled teenagers in Mae Martin’s off-beat, scattered new Netflix series Wayward, debuting Sept. 25.
The show’s creepy, cryptic marketing has already drawn largely unwarranted comparisons to the likes of Twin Peaks and Stranger Things, but only the opening scene comes close to either.
It’s 2003, and a panicked teenage boy tears through an underlit forest late one night, trailed by a droning voice going on about something to do with his mother and an all-important door. Of course, we’ll come to learn that he’s an escapee of Tall Pines Academy, the juvenile delinquency school that the bespectacled Evelyn (Collette) lords over in small-town Tall Pines, Vermont.
But first, Wayward eases viewers into the town’s eccentricities through the eyes of both teenage and adult newcomers. The teens are inseparable Toronto besties Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind), who are introduced quite literally hopping onto piles of garbage after a mid-day smoke session leaves them stranded on their school roof.
Leila is the clear ringleader of the two, coping with her older sister’s recent death by ditching school for sex, drugs, and a 26-year-old boyfriend with nary a brain cell in sight. Naturally, that lingering trauma makes her an obvious target for Evelyn’s… unconventional methods when the girls’ parents ship them off to Tall Pines Academy.
Abbie and Leila conveniently arrive in Tall Pines just as police officer Alex (Martin) decides to put down roots there with his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon). Following a bumpy, nondescript past on Detroit’s police force, Laura is positive that a fresh start in her hometown is just what the couple needs on the cusp of expanding their family. Only, wouldn’t you know it, Laura turns out to be a graduate of Tall Pines Academy herself, with deep ties to Evelyn.
The rest of the townspeople are as reticent to discuss the academy’s missing boy as she is—they’re far more interested in Alex and Laura’s baby, a fixation that grows significantly more unsettling as Alex realizes that there are approximately zero children around.
Martin, who previously shot to international prominence creating and starring in the pseudo-autobiographical Netflix dramedy Feel Good, has described Wayward as “Booksmart meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” That’s a fairly accurate summation of the teen half of the show, in which Abbie and Leila are forced to juggle typical high school crushes and social hierarchies alongside a new reality in which they’re more inmates than students.
Wayward is at its best when it sets aside its cultish pretense and gives Topliffe and Alyn Lind the chance to make a meal of their characters’ girlish codependency. There’s a lived-in authenticity to their relationship that grounds the show and elevates the predictably tropey abuses they face in early Tall Pines Academy scenes. Martin makes for a charming audience surrogate themself, although Collette—who is largely limited to skulking in shadows and delivering monotone monologues eons away from Hereditary—is sorely underused.
Yet once Wayward starts peeling back the layers of Evelyn’s town-wide scheme, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that, beneath a veneer of atmospheric tension and compelling ideas, there isn’t much to grab onto at all.
Evelyn’s acolytes chatter about a seemingly supernatural ritual known as “the Leap,” which she’s clearly grooming Leila for in sessions forcing her to “remember” her sister’s death (a manipulative, vaguely cultish tactic that evokes Nine Perfect Strangers). Meanwhile, Alex—a trans guy eagerly anticipating fatherhood despite his wife’s general apathy towards parenthood—is taken aback to discover that, history of missing kids aside, Tall Pines is a diverse, liberal enclave with none of the conservative bigotry that usually backs the “troubled teen” industry in sight.
There are interesting lingering threads in Wayward to parse about collectivism versus individualism, and how pursuits of the perfect nuclear, neurotypical family can wreak intergenerational havoc, regardless of ideology or identity. The trouble is, fascinating ideas aren’t enough to prop up a several-hour TV series without a clear sense of self.
Martin may have had past success mixing comedy and drama, but in their first foray into genre-ish television, they can’t commit to a stronger overall vision. In an ideal world, Wayward might have gone all in on using its extreme setting to deliver a heightened treatise on the hells of coming-of-age among grown-ups who have already written you off. Or perhaps it could’ve embraced the transcendental, evocative imagery of a show like Twin Peaks, using the surreal to mine Martin’s interest in the perils of groupthink without resorting to trite remarks about how “no one is born bad.”
It’s ironic that a show whose central antagonist brags about “fixing the problem of adolescence” is set to debut mere weeks after another Netflix limited series, Adolescence, swept the Emmys. If only Wayward, like its suspicious townies, could break the spooky pageantry and take a beat to figure out what kind of tale it wants to tout to curious outsiders, once and for all.
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