We all know what Philip Larkin had to say about parents. It’s hard to argue with his gleefully profane poem, which has become a sort of secular gospel, about how people can’t help passing their flaws down the family tree. But humanity has yet to devise a method of raising children superior to the nuclear family. Is such a thing even possible, let alone desirable?
This is the question that propels Netflix’s Wayward, an extraordinary new series from the comedian and Feel Good creator Mae Martin. Combining elements of psychological thriller, teen drama, and police procedural—earnest genres that benefit from a dose of Martin’s downbeat humor—it tweaks familiar tropes in service of a narrative whose ideas about family are novel. As it touches on hotly debated topics, from trans identity to the troubled teen industry, the show distinguishes itself by contextualizing and complicating them rather than devolving into polemic.
Set in 2003—not just a more innocent time, but also the year Martin turned 16—Wayward peers into the soul of Tall Pines, Vt., a charming and scenic small town with secrets that could be an East Coast sister city to Twin Peaks, Wash. It’s a place where everyone knows everyone, and they all regularly converge at a thriving farmers market. The hippies who migrated here in the 1960s and ’70s established the kind of tolerant, progressive community you’d find in an archetypal New England college town. But instead of a university, Tall Pines is home to Tall Pines Academy, a boarding school whose leader, Evelyn Wade (a quietly terrifying Toni Collette), has been hailed as a visionary for her interventions with teens deemed beyond help. “See who you really are and DO something about it,” proclaims a brochure bearing her face.
We first glimpse this ambiguous advertisement in the office of a high school guidance counselor in Toronto. Mr. Turner (Patrick J. Adams) has lost patience with Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind), a rebellious student whose loneliness and guilt following the death of her older sister have given way to an intense friendship with a former nerd named Abbie (Sydney Topliffe). Now both girls are skipping classes, doing drugs, and bonding over their love of ’60s youth culture in general and the Beatles in particular. Turner wants them separated; he tactfully informs Leila that she’s a “toxic addict sociopath with abandonment issues” who is dragging her friend down with her. Abbie’s parents, uptight yuppies whose perennially brie-stocked fridge is a running joke, agree. Because Leila’s single mom can’t afford Tall Pines’ tuition, Abbie goes instead. In typical reform-school fashion, she’s abducted in the middle of the night by burly men and thrown into a white van with her family looking on as though powerless to stop what they, in fact, started. Across the border, she’s processed, uniformed, and assigned to a spartan bunk with an officious roommate who says things like: “Most of the food here is brown. It’s very relaxing.”
As Abbie is adjusting (or not) to TPA’s aggressive and at times mysterious rehabilitation program, a young couple expecting a baby is trying to build a life in Tall Pines, complete with a rustic home provided rent-free by Evelyn. An Academy graduate, Laura (Sarah Gadon) has longed for the town’s close-knit community, which she believes will be the ideal place to raise a child and build a body-work practice. Her husband, Alex (Martin), is a cop fresh off a traumatic experience as a trans man on the force in Detroit. He’s relieved when his new partner, Laura’s old friend Dwayne (Brandon Jay McLaren), assures him that the open-minded people here will treat him like “one of the guys.” His peace of mind doesn’t survive the first commute to work, when Alex and Dwayne nearly run over a dirty, barefoot, hysterical boy, Riley (Gage Munroe), who has escaped from TPA. He flees as they’re trying to help him, spurring a manhunt.
Something about the investigation feels off, though—especially once Evelyn blows into the police station like a force of nature, directing officers who hang on her words. No one seems worried about what caused Riley to run away from the school, nor do they blink an eye at Alex’s discovery that many other kids have vanished from its grounds over the years. Meanwhile, it’s hard to get a read on Laura. While she’s a willing beneficiary of Evelyn’s generosity, she isn’t entirely uncritical of the woman she credits with easing her transition from wild teen, abandoned by her parents at TPA, to functional adult. “She’s brilliant, but she’s also a lot,” Laura explains to Alex. “She can kind of see right through you.” Alex’s ominous response: “You’re like that.”
Between Alex’s sniffing around and Abbie’s bumpy initiation, the sense of something sinister festering not just at the Academy but throughout the Tall Pines community grows. There’s little doubt that Evelyn is at the center of it. What effectively drives the show’s suspense is the slow revelation of her extreme methods, the philosophy behind them, and where in her own life it all originated. With her preternatural calm, weird directness, and ’70s-throwback style (elbow-length waves, oversize glasses, black turtlenecks—shades of Gloria Steinem), she’s an unsettling enigma more than a traditional villain. Though she’s certainly eager to arrange tuition payments, you also get the sense that she truly believes her strict program is shaping stable, happy adults. It gives the character a touch of vulnerability, layered under the broader notes of Collette’s performance, that becomes crucial as the season approaches its cryptic finale.
Inspired by their own past as a self-described “wayward teen in the early 2000s” with a best friend who brought home crazy stories from reform school, Martin builds a fictional world that convincingly fuses the darkest elements of the troubled teen industry, cult psychology, and the New Age movement that exploded during the so-called “Me” Decade. Evelyn’s multi-step curriculum involves breaking down her young charges’ resistance before building them back up as members of the Tall Pines community. In a diabolical variation on the real hot-seat technique, students pelt each other with accusations before coming together in a group snuggle that’s at least as disturbing as the emotional—and sometimes physical—violence. Attachment theory pervades an institution that seems fixated on severing teens’ bonds with parents who are invariably discovered to be, if not complete monsters, at least ill-suited for the task of caring for their own children. All-consuming friendships like Abbie and Leila’s are equally suspect.
Evelyn’s ideology and Alex’s investigation become screens onto which Martin subtly projects the show’s themes. Laura struggles to feel a connection to her baby-to-be. The pressure Alex, who is endowed by Martin with endearing softness and paralyzing self-doubt, feels to be a brave cop, a strong father, and the righteous hero of this story can’t be separated from his experience as a trans man still honing his relationship to masculinity. LGBTQ people abound in the orbit of Evelyn and Tall Pines Academy—presumably because so many of them were rejected at a young age by their families. The outline of Leila and Abbie’s good-girl-bad-girl bond is so common within the teen-drama canon as to be a cliché, yet here the assumptions of grown-up authority figures are challenged by the irrepressible individuality with which these two characters are written and portrayed. Even Abbie’s parentally consensual kidnapping captures an anxiety among Canadians about their neighbors to the south that couldn’t be more timely in 2025.
Few of these themes are underlined in dialogue. None are resolved in a prescriptive way. Wayward communicates in resonances, encouraging independent contemplation more than it dictates a specific moral or political agenda. Implicit in this mode of storytelling is a rejoinder to mentalities like Evelyn’s. No matter whether you are a Type A helicopter parent or a touchy–feely therapist, the road to authoritarianism begins with the certainty that you are right.
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