Netflix’s new comic book TV series shouldn’t work at all, but it does.
“Sweet Tooth,” out on Friday, June 4, adapted from Jeff Lemire’s graphic novels for DC’s discontinued “adult” Vertigo imprint, is a postapocalyptic adventure featuring a 10-year-old boy with deer antlers. There’s a deadly pandemic, a violent militia, horrifying medical experiments … and it’s made for the whole family to enjoy.
Somehow whimsy, paranoia, sometimes brutal action and hard-pressed affection find a pleasing tonal balance throughout the first season’s eight episodes. Credit that to showrunners Beth Schwartz (“Arrow”) and Jim Mickle, who has directed a number of tough little genre films that put children in dire predicaments (“Stake Land,” “We Are What We Are,” “Cold in July”).
美国的反乌托邦也能看eerily like 2020 (when “Sweet Tooth” was filmed in relatively COVID-free New Zealand) — there are temp checks and people masked up and ignoring social-distancing rules. Folks demonstrate for and against an oppressed minority, and toilet paper is hoarded in a boxcar. The plague was in the comics a dozen years ago, but the series does a tremendous job of anchoring its fanciful scenario in details we can all, unfortunately, recognize today.
Concurrent with the fictional H5G9 virus’ deadly spread, babies were born with animal features. Though no scientific evidence linked the hybrids to the disease, most surviving humans were eager to blame it on them, and as a result the sweet, scared furries were chased down for a decade.
Infant deer boy Gus was taken to safety in the Yellowstone woods at the start of the Great Crumble by his father (played by Lafayette native Will Forte, in a dramatic variation of his “Last Man on Earth” persona). Older Gus is played by Christian Convery (“Beautiful Boy”) as an upbeat, curious child, his natural adorableness enhanced by furry ears, if not by the 18-inch three-pointers sticking out of his skull.
Circumstances drive Gus from his safe forest home out to what’s left of civilization. He’s reluctantly protected by the traumatized Tommy Jepperd (a gruff but tender Nonso Anozie, “Game of Thrones”), a former football pro and ex-member of the hybrid-hunting Last Men, who justify their power-mad violence with claims that they’re “preserving our race.”
Sweet Tooth and Big Man, as they call each other, pick up a third combative wheel in Bear (charismatic Stefania LaVie Owen), who led a fractious group of hybrid allies called the Animal Army, human teens who can be as dangerous as the Last Men.
Parallel plot lines involve Dr. Aditya Singh (Adeel Akhtar from “Enola Holmes” and “The Big Sick”), a decent man who’ll do anything to save his wife, Rani (Aliza Vellani), from H5G9 and the conditionally friendly neighbors in their “safe” suburb. Elsewhere, psychologist Aimee Eden (“Once Upon a Time’s” Dania Ramirez) has set up a fragile refuge for hybrid children, some of whom are much more animal-like than others. James Brolin provides unnecessary parables in annoying voice-over narration.
Produced by Team Downey (Susan and Marvel’s “Iron Man” Robert Jr.), “Sweet Tooth” presents an atypically verdant end of the world, washed in green and pretty, worrisome flowers. It all boils down to a multifaceted, if bizarre, examination of family and what that means, considered not just in traditional and surrogate unit form, but all the way up through tribe and sect to species. Some pretty heady ideas here for a kids show, but then family entertainment, like so many things in 2021, is evolving in ways that we haven’t seen before.
M“Sweet Tooth”:Science fiction. Starring Christian Convery, Nonso Anozie, Adeel Akhtar and Stefania LaVie Owen. Directed mostly by Jim Mickle. (TV-14. Eight approximately one-hour episodes.) Available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, June 4.