The Wilds Season 2 loses focus by adding boys

The A.V. Club

"In season two, the writers are trying to walk a fine line," says Lauren Chval of the Amazon dystopian teen survival drama. "If they spend too much time with the boys, they’ll risk alienating fans who love the girls. If they don’t spend enough time with them, the fans won’t connect with them. The show errs on the side of not enough time with the boys, which is smart; the girls are our leads, our loves, our flawed heroines. But the decision has consequences. By season’s end, the boys still mostly feel like the two-dimensional caricatures they’re introduced as." Chval adds that "one thing we loved about season one was that, even though all of the girls did terrible things, none of them could be so easily labeled monstrous. To flatten any of the boys into villains feels like a shallow exploration of masculinity. Here, a lot of male characters feel more like ideas than fleshed-out people."

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• The magic is still there in The Wilds Season 2: "Not only is it still there, but it’s viscerally evident from the premiere’s first moments, in which Leah’s meditation on how the girls were brought together by the trauma of the shark attack that lost Rachel (Reign Edwards) both a hand and a sister in the Season 1 finale cuts to the reveal of our new control group flying in on an ominously familiar (and cake-filled) plane; a winking introduction that in turn cuts to an achingly endearing montage of the self-recorded 'what I hope to learn!' videos these nine new boys apparently made in the run-up to their (doomed) 'retreat,'" says Alexis Gunderson. "Get barely five minutes into that first episode—titled, appropriately enough for our now dueling experiments, '30/1'—and I dare you not to fall half in love."
• There are too many characters and too little time in Season 2: "Part of it could because of the crowded plotting with two less episodes and twice the characters," says Tim Surette. "Part of it could also be that we've seen Lord of the Flies alpha male posturing like this so many times before, although the writers do try to modernize some of the classic issues in this dynamic and introduce a shocking act midway through the season that really reshapes 'Adam.' The first season worked because all of the characters felt distinct, well-performed with full, rich back stories. That’s not the case here, but there are a few stand-outs: Miles Gutierrez-Riley and Alex Fitzalan feel like future stars...It's all a result of trying to do too much with too little time."
• The male characters in season two just aren't as richly drawn as the female ones in the first season: "Part of it could because of the crowded plotting with two less episodes and twice the characters," says Brian Tallerico. "Part of it could also be that we've seen Lord of the Flies alpha male posturing like this so many times before, although the writers do try to modernize some of the classic issues in this dynamic and introduce a shocking act midway through the season that really reshapes 'Adam.' The first season worked because all of the characters felt distinct, well-performed with full, rich back stories. That’s not the case here, but there are a few stand-outs: Miles Gutierrez-Riley and Alex Fitzalan feel like future stars."
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• The Wilds creator Sarah Streicher on adding boys to Season 2: "From the storytelling perspective, that gave us an opportunity to have this new lens on a different kind of coming-of-age experience — that of men," she says. "What was particularly exciting for me was that we started with women as our baseline and then we're pivoting to men as our counterpoint and that is not something that you see necessarily. It's usually the other way around. From that angle, it was just this thrilling possibility so we ran with it."
• Streicher watched Yellowjackets, but fellow executive producer Amy B. Harris did not: In fact, Streicher was aware of Yellowjackets during The Wilds' development process because they "went into a panic" when her late fellow producer Jamie Tarses told her "you have to hurry up because there’s something else out there." "I have watched it," says Streicher of the Showtime survival drama. "It didn’t feel like a pure experience. I was like, 'Oh, they have a black box. Oh, they’re looking for water now. They’re hunting.' My brain was in their writers’ room as they were hatching it out, so it was a little bit clouded. But at the same time, I had a thrilling time. I adore just the intensity of it all. Perhaps we’re emerging from a long period of dismissing teenage girls or giving them kind of smaller, more intimate stories, and there’s hunger to really show their grit and show their strength in a really raw way where it cannot be disputed. That’s what both of our shows do, to a certain extent." Harris adds: "I have not watched because we were working on Season 2 when it was coming out. I got very nervous that it would start affecting my ability to just drill into what we were doing. But I’m eager to watch it. I just wanted to wait until we’ve launched this."