Wayward is the latest show by comedian and Feel Good creator Mae Martin, a Netflix series about the darkness at the heart of the “troubled teen” industry. I watched it because I’m a sucker for anything that hints at being about cults, and while I liked a lot of the show, its take on trans masculinity made me a little uneasy.
Martin plays Alex Dempsey, a cop who moves with his pregnant wife Laura to the small Vermont town of Tall Pines. Laura went to Tall Pines Academy, an institute for troubled teens run by Evelyn Wade. Once Tall Pines students graduate, they’re given homes and jobs in the town, which gives Evelyn a lot of sway over how things work and a particularly intimate relationship with Laura and the rest of the school’s graduates. Almost immediately after moving in, Alex becomes aware that things aren’t as idyllic as they seem, when he encounters one of the Academy’s frequent runaways who makes him wonder what’s actually going on behind the school’s walls and why the town seems so content to look the other way.
There’s a second plotline featuring teen best friends Leila and Abbie; Abbie is sent to Tall Pines by her parents, and Leila gets stuck there when she breaks in to rescue Abbie. It’s in this plotline that Wayward takes its most straightforward political aim at the industry the show focuses on: kids are mistreated and belittled, made to do senseless manual labor, turned against each other, and face other abuses that Martin described to Deadline as “a useful metaphor for all of the sort of oppressive systems that we are seduced by.” They’re forced to play a Synanon-style game where they berate each other under the guise of honesty, and all of this starts to drive a wedge between Leila and Abbie, even as they’re forced to work together to try to escape the Academy. This plotline also explores the nature of teen relationships: how long-lasting should they be, and how can they affect the trajectory of your life?
Abbie and Leila work with Alex to uncover abuses at the Academy, while Alex discovers increasingly creepy facts about the town. Wayward started to stretch the bounds of credulity to me a little bit here, especially in regards to a much-touted and much-feared treatment Evelyn doles out. In some ways, the show is deeply rooted in the realities of the self-help and teen behavior industry, and how the good intentions of hippie movements lost their way over time. But as it goes on it starts to drift away from how the school’s philosophy–breaking a cycle of toxicity passed down in the relationship from parent to child–undergirds its structure and practices and more into a grab-bag of abuses and vague, unrealistic-feeling fare involving drugs and rituals. Dramatically, I get this, but as a tiresome stickler for media about cults, I found myself wishing it had stayed a little more grounded.
It’s a very queer show: Leila is attracted to both men and women, there are many queer folks in the town, and Alex is a trans man. People are very accepting of all this, which comes up right away when Laura takes pains to explain that Tall Pines’ roots as a 70s hippie commune makes it more liberal than one might expect for small town Vermont. No one misgenders Alex or anything like that, and while I think the show would have been dragged down by adding “trans man tries to fit in with small town police force” to all the topics it tackles, pretending queer discrimination simply doesn’t exist the way some media about queer people does these days might make sense as a narrative choice, but always comes off a little forced to me.
Most notably to me, though, is the way that Alex struggles with his own tendency toward violence. Something happened in his old job in Detroit, and there are several instances in Tall Pines when he responds with undue violence to a situation in front of him. I won’t say it isn’t weird to root for Martin playing a cop (Martin told Deadline, “I hope people get that [Wayward is] not pro-cop”), and the use of excessive force definitely fits within that narrative. But Alex’s violent streak also gets tied to his gender: Martin, who is nonbinary and on a low dose of testosterone, told Deadline that Alex is “definitely someone who’s seduced by and yearning for that kind of heteronormative hypermasculinity and a nuclear family” that working as a cop and having a wife and child offer.
In a confrontation with Evelyn, she tells Alex, “It must be hard to search for yourself your whole life, only to realize you are a violent cliche… How many people do you have to hurt before self-defense feels like a hollow refrain?... You love an idea of [Laura] because it makes you feel like a real man.” But I didn’t feel like I ever saw Alex himself grappling with his gender in relation to his family or behavior; something I liked about the show was that it had a trans man who had other things going on than transitioning. To me, this stood in contrast to characters like Evelyn bringing it up, or Martin pointing it out in interviews.
The idea that testosterone makes trans men angry or violent is a myth perpetuated not just by transphobes, but sometimes by people within queer and trans communities. I’ve seen it used by people I know as reasons not to go on hormones, and I’ve had it used against me when I’ve had disagreements with people in my life who had negative feelings about trans men. I felt uncomfortable seeing Wayward flirt with the idea, especially in a character not written or played by a trans man, especially when trans men are so seldom seen in media. At the same time, Alex is a much more complicated character than just his gender identity, so I don’t think it’s just a matter of cliches, but I definitely felt uneasy about it.
Despite feeling unsure of Wayward’s portrayal of trans men, it had enough drama and intrigue to inspire me to watch the series in a weekend, and it ends on a note that would make me interested in a second season if it gets one. (You never know with Netflix, of course.) I was a big fan of Feel Good, so I was glad to see another show by Martin; if you’re into their work, or just some drama about teens, Wayward is worth checking out.
