Wayward is set in the idyllic town of Tall Pines, where everything seems perfect. Your classic white picket fence slice of paradise. But as you might have guessed already, nothing is quite what it seems.
OK, it shouldn't be that surprising if you're even slightly familiar with the work of series creator Mae Martin, who also stars as Alex Dempsey, a police officer investigating some troubling disappearances at the local school.
It would have been easy to play off the horrors that so often come when queer people are forced to return to their hometown, or any small town for that matter. There's a reason so many of us migrate to cities, after all, often as an escape from the bigotry that – not always – but often comes in the rural parts of pretty much any country.
However, as the series progresses, it becomes clear that this isn't actually the case at all.
Alex never hides who he is, and he never feels the need to talk about it lots either. This isn't a queer drama about the struggles or even joy of being trans. Instead, this is an occasionally funny nightmarish thriller where the main character just so happens to be a trans man.
When Alex pretends to be taking his testosterone shots as an excuse to escape and further his investigation, it's a small detail that normalises trans identity without making it the focus. Not that there would be any issue in doing so – these stories are hugely important and valid too – but there's something to be said for normalising such experiences in this current climate especially.
In another show, this could have come across as distasteful or even disrespectful, but Wayward is queer through and through, so jokes like this hit differently here (especially given Martin's key involvement in the writing itself). Leila is bisexual even, as many of the characters are suggested to be.
But what's perhaps most impressive about Wayward is how it neither demonises nor idolises queer characters like Alex. While some people in the show are more monstrous than others, they all exist in the murky greys of good or bad, right or wrong. And I'm not just talking about that icky tadpole water either.
Because just when you think Alex has escaped Tall Pines with Abbie and his baby in tow, it turns out that this happy ending the show tricks us into seeing wasn't actually real at all. The truth is that Alex lets Abbie down, choosing his new family over doing the right thing.
Nothing is what it seems in Wayward, twisting and bending our expectations throughout. And that might be the queerest thing of all about this show, which redefines mainstream notions of family and genre with a delightfully queer outsider perspective. More than the thrills or the scares or the Mufasa one-liners, it's this that helps set Wayward apart in the best way possible.
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Wayward is streaming now on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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