2 out of 5

Created by: Nicôle Lecky

Better film historians than I – so, like, actual historians – could likely provide an interesting overview of how the rich, as a social class, are treated across US and UK cinema throughout the ages. Just some selected beats from the silent era, 50s idealism, 70s cynicism, and 90s rebelliousness starts to sketch out a take, biased by how I’ve boiled eras down to words which obviously can’t summarize a single year, much less a decade; but: something happened when reality TV started to platform “the elite” as entertainment. I generally am of the school that finds patterns in all things, so I recognize that we’ve (as people) been reveling in money-scrubbed antics even before money necessarily defined the class distinctions, though without going that macro, reality TV + expanding technology + social media + the pandemic kept building on viewerly trends such that we’re now experiencing what I’ve heard referred to as “eat the rich” pieces of TV / film, which, to those who are active streaming viewers in the mid-2020s, can probably recognize as most things Nicole Kidman has starred in, or that it feels like she could star in.

In you’re reading this during some other time, you might think “eat the rich” sounds like we’re in some kind of critical stage of the assessment of wealth, but not, it’s building on the trends I mentioned: it’s “rich people: they’re just like this,” where the ‘eating’ is of a tragedy-of-their-own-design form. Like, man, they have it all, and can’t avoid making the same human mistakes as us non-plebes, showing how fragile their lives can be.

(This is my interpretation, but see above about me not being a historian and feel free to extrapolate as to my interpretative competence.)

Wild Cherry takes place on “The Island,” which is not an island, but – as we’re smirkingly, indirectly told by our narrator, Gigi (played by show creator / writer Nicôle Lecky) – is how its super rich denizens refer to their neighborhood as kind of a clear indicator of who’s in and who’s out of the money club. Flash forwards precede each episode to let us know that there’s some bloody crime forthcoming, as we witness mothers Lorna and Juliet (Carmen Ejogo and Eve Best) and their respective daughters, Grace and Allegra (Imogen Faires and Amelia May), washing said blood from their hands and exchanging worried glances; Gigi informs us of helpful things like, “these bitches are wild,” which I might be only slightly paraphrasing.

Flash back, and Wild Cherry sets up multiple layers of class, gender, and racial warfare: within the elite mothers club of which Lorna and Juliet are a part; between their daughters’ friends and their classmates; Lorna’s and Grace’s blackness would seem to make them a sub-class of rich; and there’re scales of fame being pursued with Julien having written a parenting book and the two girls trying to make it big with posts on socials, which brings them into the circuit of influencer-house runner K Rizz (Jason York). Secrets, inevitably, abound: Grace and Allegra are running some type of scurrilous side business which is upping their social profile; Juliet’s marriage is in shambles; Lorna is getting threatening texts from someone that she refuses to share with her husband; and so on, and so on.

These “eat the rich” dramas – which were preceded in popularity by smalltown mystery dramas with similar beats – tend to focus heavily on these secrets, and use them to stir up red herring frenzies around / leading up to whatever discovered crime or, in this case, forthcoming crime. It’s annoying, because it quickly becomes clear that the drama is the point and not, say, the story, or the characters. But Wild Cherry, initially, seems to be taking the opposite tactic: it’s using the expectation of that format to actually explore its characters. Or at least its younger generation: Lecky seems to be being kind of cheeky by casting herself as pretty aloof, and while some of the kid experiences feel slightly sanitized, there is a frankness to the girls dealing with the relative celebrity of the apps alongside the above-mentioned layers of classicism and racism, alongside the way budding (and confusing) sexual maturity comes in to play in a world that expects you to be fully in charge of your body before you have any idea what that means… it’s a lot for the show to deal with, but it does it in a pretty gripping and raw fashion, though primarily by ditching most of the adult drama to the episodes’ edges. I mentioned Lecky’s character’s aloofness because that seems to be kind of the self-aware wink: you think this is going to be a saucy drama about rich ladies, but I’m making you face up to the damage this is doing to the up and coming generation.

Alas, this fractures. Lecky’s character is not aloof, and the first sign we get of this – about halfway through the show – is when it starts falling back on all the typical nonsense, and the girl’s plights get reduced to she-said/she-said bickering that starts to sound a lot like red herring setups. Episode 4 is a fucking drug trip episode – my least favorite trope – when all the characters do shrooms or something as a shortcut to getting people to reveal something or realize something and we get some giggles out of people acting silly because omg we’ve all done shrooms and so on and so on.

Essentially, the writing and characters the were more shallow – the adults and their storylines – come to the forefront in the series’ back half, and while you can see the parallels Lecky is making to the children’s situation which is potentially interesting, the show also has to start to get us closer to the flash forward stuff, so set aside most of the character exploration at this point, and “these bitches are wild” type statements are no longer said with a wink but are meant to be… poignant.

Wild Cherry is a series that tries something of value with the subgenre, but its somewhat unnecessary storytelling / cast density comes back to bite it, and it ultimately succumbs to tropes in a speed-running fashion that makes it feel even more noxious than the norm.