The latest bingeable original to come from Amazon Prime is the studio’s turn to YA series, a new venture that will continue to be explored in the near future with a number of upcoming original shows in addition to the new The Wilds. This is a twisty series about a group of teen girls who find themselves on a deserted island together after the plane taking them to a youth camp crashes into the ocean. As the girls try to survive the circumstances, audiences are taken back and forth between their pasts and uncertain futures. Remind anyone of Lost?
It’s been a decade since Damon Lindelof, Jeffrey Lieber and J.J. Abrams’ series ended over on ABC. Ten years later, the series has had a large influence on television as a whole with its use of intersecting timelines and flashbacks as a storytelling tool. It was only a matter of time before we saw a new take on Lost for streaming, but The Wilds is no Lost.
There are a lot of secrets lying behind its basic premise that will set it apart, but the show’s creator Sarah Streicher, of Netflix’s fan-favorite Daredevil, did tell CinemaBlend about one major influence Lost had on the making of The Wilds. In Streicher’s words:
We stand on the shoulders of that giant, right down to the flashbacks, they got a lot of things right. We have this present timeline, which I think they had a sideways timeline at one point? I was often afraid, like ‘Oh my god, did we build a behemoth? Can a show even sustain this many timelines?’ But, Lost is proof that you can actually hold a lot in an hour of TV and more is actually better than something thin, so big salute.
The Wilds follows a group of eight women in their time before the island, on the island and after they are no longer there, being interrogated in some sort of secret bunker. As the creator explained, there are a lot of different tenses being explored all at once, but Lost was a solid indicator for Sarah Streicher that it could work. She continued by discussing why she decided to marry survival with a YA storyline:
[The Wilds] was kind of born of my own internal experience – I had a breakup and it made me feel like a teenager again. And thus, I wanted to deeply write about the adolescent experience and I wanted to honor the intensity of it by really marrying the teenage moment with the intensity of a deserted island.
Sarah Streicher appears to explore her personal influence with the central character on the show, Sarah Pidgeon’s Leah Rike, who has just gone through a messy breakup with an older man before she finds herself on the island with strangers. Leah’s story is just one of the many vivid stories audiences will learn about as the first season explores each of the characters’ tragedies and lives. The Wilds was filmed in New Zealand and is produced by Sex and the City and The Carrie Diaries’ Amy Harris.
The ten-episode season of The Wilds is available to binge on Amazon Prime now. Have you checked out the series yet? Vote in our poll below.
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