This show is for teens, and it is not subtle about hammering home a central idea regarding humanity's role in destroying our planet through climate change and an insatiable thirst for more. On the surface, Sweet Tooth isn't about the pandemic at all.
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The risotto episode of How to With John Wilson, for instance, includes overrun grocery stores and scenes from hospitals, but it ends by underscoring our need for human interaction and the newly realized immense value in it. For me, the stuff that works so far has had some degree of optimism or hope underneath the adversity, chaos, and tragedy. Maybe my appetite for it will eventually change, though let's revisit that in a decade. But given how all-encompassing this ongoing global situation has been, of course you can't help but consume some of it, even by accident. I have yet to actively seek out any pandemic-related pop culture.
The creative team had already made a few decisions to tone down the bleakness of the source material, and the benefits of those choices are only amplified by the context viewers bring to the show in summer 2021.
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Sweet Tooth's source comic wrapped in 2013, and production on this Netflix series began long before COVID-19 took over. The world hasn't beaten him down into expecting the worst all the time, and his general optimism and wonder keep this story feeling light enough despite many gut punches along the way. Unlike Rick Grimes ( The Walking Dead), June ( Handmaid's Tale), or many other characters existing in an apocalyptic new reality, Gus is still a kid. Mostly, that's because of its central figure.
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(When will people in TV and film learn that there may be no scarier, more dangerous place than white picket fence-lined suburban neighborhoods? Sigh.) In another notable zombie-brains-show similarity, the bad guys (whether that's a disease or a disassociated lunatic military man) seem to come out on top more often than not, at least in these first eight episodes.ĭespite that, Sweet Tooth never veers entirely into ruin porn or nihilism. Like TWD, Sweet Tooth has our heroes going through cycles where they encounter many different groups of people who initially seem nice and helpful only to reveal themselves to be something else later on, often with tragic results. Again and again, the show gave me flashbacks to when I used to follow The Walking Dead, which I had quit watching entirely after hours and hours of despair. It would be very, very easy for Sweet Tooth to become too dark, too emotionally heavy, or too tiresome for viewers who have lived some of this stuff IRL in the last 16 months. Luckily, that predictability doesn't make the journey ahead any less fun.įurther Reading The Walking Dead is now where brains are eaten, not used In the middle of this whole mess sits Gus, a deerboy Hybrid who simply lived a quiet life in an isolated Yellowstone cabin with his father until, well, you can probably see where this is headed. In particular, Hybrids' immunity to The Sick has swaths of this new world curious about whether their DNA can be harvested for treatment or prevention. Others, though, see Hybrids as a hindrance to humanity getting past The Sick and returning to normalcy. Why did this evolution happen? How many are there? And, most pertinent, what makes Hybrids immune to The Sick? In the face of all that mystery, some portions of this new world look at Hybrids as a hopeful evolution of humanity, a group of individuals society should protect and help thrive. The ratio of column A to column B varies-some talk, some don't many look like traditional kids with small animal features all retain abilities like heightened hearing or smell-but no one seems to know anything for sure. Oh, and in Sweet Tooth, the next generation of kids appears to include half-animal/half-human individuals called Hybrids.
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This withdrawal has allowed nature to essentially step into the void-animals previously only seen in a zoo roam free, and landscapes grow out in full to replenish what society previously destroyed for resources. No cure or vaccination has been discovered, so most humans opt to live in isolation either as individuals or as disease-free groups. This disaster, however, can't be contained even to the extent of COVID-19. An unnamed narrator calls it "The Great Crumble." A disease colloquially referred to as The Sick spreads rapidly among humans while overwhelming infrastructure, grinding daily life to a halt, and racking up a body count. When this story begins, society tries to put itself together again. Netflix's new fantasy series, Sweet Tooth, first looks like a crudely fictionalized version of 2020.
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