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…
