WOLF PACK Season One
Teen Wolves Too
UK/US Paramount+, streaming now Showrunner Jeff Davis Cast Sarah Michelle Gellar, Armani Jackson, Bella Shepard, Tyler Lawrence Gray
EPISODES 1.01-1.08 Pigeonholing clearly holds no fear for showrunner Jeff Daniels. Having guided the TV version of Teen Wolf through six seasons (and a recent, dire TV movie) he’s now unleashed Wolf Pack.
Yep, another lycanthropic teen soap. So you’d think that the new show must deliver some amazing new twist on the genre, right? Well, erm…
To be fair, the series – based on a 2004 book by Edo van Belkom – does introduce some new lore to the werewolf mythology; each member of the pack here has a special power
Expect lots of frequently topless teens with superripped bodies
(super-speed, super-hearing, super-strength etc), but don’t expect X-wolves. Do expect lots of frequently topless teens with super-ripped bodies (even the nerds) having relationship issues in-between bouts of gore and ropey CG creature attacks.
It begins with a Los Angeles forest fire that forces more than the usual wildlife out of the mountains, and arson investigator Kristin Ramsey (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is clearly looking for more than just a common or garden firestarter. Two outsider teens attacked by something fleeing the flames lose their acne and anxiety attacks and start receiving anonymous phone calls giving them doomy, cryptic messages. Then people start vanishing.
It’s glossier than Teen Wolf, and its werewolves don’t look like a ’60s Tom Jones, so that’s good. Some effectively tense horror moments liven things up, and eventually Gellar gets something interesting to do after spending too many episodes looking bored.
But the teen characters are uniformly bland, hampered by utilitarian, witless dialogue and a thin plot that struggles to fill eight episodes. Things do perk up for a revelation-packed finale, though, which takes an unexpected turn for the weird.
Dave Golder
Gellar told Vogue that the only similarities she shares with her character Kristin are, “We both have really good boots.”