4 out of 5

Created by: Jeff Davis

covers season 1

Werewolves, lot of teens, many abs, and Sarah Michelle Gellar; surely Wolf Pack is yet another slice of teen supernatural drama, something we might spot on CW, that uses its unreal subject matter – werewolves – to parallel oh-so-dramatic teen things in prime soap tone, and with lots of cute boys and girls kissing, and getting into relationships with one another, and parents suck-ing, and etc.*

And Wolf Pack has all of that stuff, but it’s also plotted very atypically for such fare – one might say ‘maturely,’ which a surprising dedication to slow building its narrative – and manages to make all those abs and kissing feel either contextually acceptable (swim party!), or, when it comes to the relationship stuff, part of the story in ways that don’t feel like out-and-out fan-service. I started out by rolling my eyes when an opening scene had Sexy Teen A doing shirtless ab dancing, and later on, when Sexy Teen B remarks that werewolf powers have given him abs (I’m paraphrasing), but it’s almost like the show is baiting its teen demographic with this stuff in order to be able to sneak in, like, a deeper story. Wild!

The show mostly focuses on nervous high schooler Everett (Armani Jackson), medicated and meditating, and the anti-social Blake (Bella Shepard). While CW-esque shows do, occasionally, swing way overboard in trying to be more modern and inclusive – which is preferred over not doing those things at all, but it can be very distractingly on-the-nose sometimes – they are also generally ahead of the curve in doing it right, and such is the case in Wolf Pack, where Everett’s anxieties are not cause for bullies to label him a nerd, and though Blake is an outcast by design, it’s also not the direct source of something she’s picked on for. (Teens are still capable of being bullies here, but it’s for more fleetingly shallow stuff.) So it’s firstly refreshing that the show avoids some low-hanging fruit signifiers of outsiderdom – we can feel like outsiders even when we’re comparatively normal. But our way into the story is also pretty arresting: there’s a giant forest fire, leading to the bus on the way to school being stopped, and then a parade of animals escaping from said zoo leads to the spotting of a giant, wolf-like animal, which variously bites and slashes several kids, in not glamorous fashion.

Abs aside, that like of glamorization is what ends up setting Wolf Pack, er, apart from the pack, as well as how it continues its story: as a slowburn build around not that werewolves exist – for various reasons, that gets to be taken for granted by our leads, and their new friends, Luna (Chloe Rose Robertson) and Harlan (Tyler Lawrence Gray) – but rather what, exactly, that werewolf from the forest wants. We get some backstory delivered by Luna’s / Harlan’s adoptive father, Garrett (Rodrigo Santoro), and mystery in the form of investigator – because someone may have set that forest fire – Gellar, playing detective Kristin Ramsay, who certainly knows more about that werewolf than she’s sharing.

The kids bicker, but not unreasonably. There is not a 1:1 comparison with being a werewolf and being a teen; werewolfism is much more of a disease of sorts here, and an uncontrollable one, hence the upped violence and frightening unpredictability – a sense of stakes – with events. All the lead kids are quite good in their roles (and the co-stars, especially Rio Mangini as mean kid Austin), and though the show kind of never clarifies its line between what kind of werewolf lore is common (silver bullets) and what isn’t, it strikes a believable balance between organic discovery and assumptions. I don’t want to mislead that the show is deep, – and, er, it maybe reaches for some creature effects there’s not time to fully smooth out – but it’s definitely much, much more than a Twilight, or even standard TV action fare, combining an American in-your-face visual sensibility with more of a serialized, piece-by-piece puzzler pace to its story, which makes for a very unique vibe for a general appeal show.

Also, to reiterate from wikipedia: this is not connected to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Teen Wolf, which streamer Paramount+ confusingly put out as another movie at the same time this show dropped. We love werewolves, apparently.

*To be fair, CW shows have come very far over the years, and are not not worth checking out, with my description really zeroing in on the earliest era for easy humor pluckings, but nonetheless, you still know what I’m talking about, and whatever the more modern version of it is.