SWEET TOOTH
Animal Magic
Being horny can be troubling.
UK/US Netflix, streaming now Showrunners Jim Mickle,
Beth Schwartz
Cast Christian Convery, Nonso Anozie, Adeel Akhtar, Dania Ramirez, Stefania Lavie Owen, Aliza Vellani
It’s very strange to see a big, lavish fantasy TV series respond to the pandemic while we’re still living through it. Shows like this take years of development, and indeed Sweet Tooth has been in the works since 2018 – and it goes back yet further, as it’s based on the acclaimed Vertigo comic by Jeff Lemire, which started in 2009.
But it wasn’t until April 2020 that Netflix acquired it from Hulu, and it was shot in New Zealand
The imagery is a mix of the strange and the grimly familiar
when restrictions there eased – so it’s inevitably coloured by knowledge of the real world.
It opens with a deadly flu-like illness raging across the world. Unlike Covid-19, this disease is invariably fatal, killing most of the population. At the same time, a generation of hybrid children are born with animal features, prompting a campaign to wipe them out – so one man takes his son Gus, who has antlers and the ears of a deer, to live in the wilderness. Ten years later, after his father’s death, Gus prevails on a violent stranger called Jeppard to help him find his mother.
The imagery of Sweet Tooth is a mix of the strange and the grimly familiar: abandoned buildings feature signs warning people to wear masks and wash their hands. Getting all this to gel with the magic realism of the hybrids is ambitious, but the series just about pulls it off. On the surface it looks quite family-friendly, and in some ways it’s warmer than the original comic – but it’s also got some really brutal stuff in it, and not just physical violence.
The most compelling thread is the one that comes most directly from the source material – Gus and his reluctant protector journeying through this broken world together – and the other threads can make the series feel uneven. The efforts of the despairing Dr Aditya Singh to find a cure and save his wife Rani are bleak, though Adeel Akhtar and Aliza Vellani are superb in those roles. The thread based around a hybrid sanctuary, meanwhile, takes a while to get going, and the way it operates on a different timescale to the others is jarring.
When we’re following Gus and Jeppard, however, it really works. The thawing of their relationship is the show’s emotional core, and Christian Convery and Nonso Anozie carry it so well. These are also the most visually striking segments, with some superbly imagined locations, like the train station and the abandoned theme park. It unfolds its mysteries skilfully, and the penultimate episode is a superb, tightly focused piece of writing – though be warned, the finale leaves a lot of unfinished business. Eddie Robson
In episode one, pay attention to the match showing in the background at the Singhs’s: it’s Jeppard’s first appearance.