Sarah Streicher's canceled dystopian teen drama sits at an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score, years after Amazon axed it on an unresolved cliffhanger.
Sarah Streicher's teen drama The Wilds ended on a cliffhanger after Amazon pulled the plug following two seasons. It's still sitting on Prime Video with an 89% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it's getting a second look now that The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is six weeks from theatres.
The show follows a group of teenage girls stranded on an island after their plane supposedly crashes en route to a wilderness retreat. Their story unfolds through interviews conducted after their rescue, cut with flashbacks to their lives before. Season 1's finale revealed a second group, teenage boys headed to a parallel retreat, had crashed too. Season 2 brought the two groups together.
Turns out neither crash was an accident. Rachel Griffiths plays Dr. Gretchen Klein, the scientist orchestrating both experiments to test whether a female-led society would be free of conflict. She watches the teenagers from the shadows and plants informants among them, and according to a Collider piece on the series, ends up occupying a role uncomfortably close to a dictator running things from behind glass. Not unlike Panem's Snow presiding over his own arena.
That comparison, drawn out by Collider in a recent piece pitching the show as a stopgap for Hunger Games fans, isn't a stretch. Both stories put teenagers through survival tests engineered by an adult hiding a bigger agenda, and both use the setup to talk about class, gender and what happens when kids get handed burdens meant for grown-ups. "Heavy burdens meant for adults forced on us before our time," Leah Rilke, played by Sarah Pidgeon, says in the pilot.
Eighteen episodes, no ending
Streicher had bigger plans. She told Collider she'd pitched a four-season arc built like a coming-of-age story, describing it as needing "the beginning of immaturity and then the coming of age, the actual metamorphosis and the chrysalis moment, and then the coming of age coming out of that into some kind of adulthood." Amazon canceled the show after Season 2 regardless, leaving Klein's escape and her promise of a mysterious "Phase 3" hanging in the air.
The ensemble includes Sophia Ali, Shannon Berry, Jenna Clause, Reign Edwards, Mia Healey, Helena Howard, Erana James, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Alex Fitzalan, Tanner Ray Rook, Reed Shannon, Charles Alexander, Nicholas Coombe, Aidan Laprete and Zack Calderon. That's a big cast for a show that never got to finish telling its story.
Sunrise on the Reaping, based on Suzanne Collins' prequel novel, opens November 20. Whether The Wilds picks up new viewers off that release is anyone's guess, but the two seasons are there, cliffhanger and all, with no sign Amazon plans to ever pay it off.
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