Netflix released all 10 episodes of The Society on May 10, 2019. The show was renewed for a second season and then canceled after one, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Christopher Keyser created the series, and what he built in one season is a mystery box wrapped around a civics lesson.
The setup is clean. The students of a West Ham, Connecticut high school come back early from a canceled field trip and find everyone else in town gone. A dense forest has closed around the town. The outside world is unreachable by telephone or Internet. The teenagers have to write their own rules and ration what is left.
West Ham, Connecticut, and the Forest Around It
The Society is a drama with sci-fi and fantasy bones, but it spends most of its time on the boring parts of building a government — and that is meant as praise. Allie Pressman, played by Kathryn Newton, ends up carrying the thing.
Alex Fitzalan’s Harry Bingham is the wealthy kid who expects to inherit the town and does not. Gideon Adlon’s Becca Gelb, Sean Berdy’s Sam Eliot, Natasha Liu Bordizzo’s Helena and Jacques Colimon’s Will LeClair fill out a cast that Netflix assembled fast. Rachel Keller, Adlon, Colimon, Olivia DeJonge, Fitzalan, Kristine Froseth, Jose Julian, Bordizzo, Alex MacNicoll, Jack Mulhern, Salena Qureshi, Grace Victoria Cox, Berdy and Toby Wallace all joined in November 2018.
The mystery is the hook. The society is the show.
Two Kinds of Show, One Season
| Element | What The Society does | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| The disappearance | Everyone else in West Ham vanishes; a forest seals the town | The answer never arrives in 10 episodes |
| The politics | Teens argue over rules, resources and power | The arguments repeat more than they build |
| The cast | Newton, Fitzalan, Adlon, Berdy and Bordizzo anchor it | Too many names, too little time for each |
| The ending | Canceled after one season | A mystery with no solution |
That last row is the whole problem. A show that opens with a question and closes with a cancellation is not a story. It is a receipt.
What the Teens Actually Build
Keyser’s best idea is that the kids do not immediately turn into savages. They hold meetings. They assign jobs. They argue about who gets to decide, which is the correct thing for a show about a town with no adults to be about. The forest is a wall, the phones are dead, and the only resource that matters is other people’s agreement.
Although it was initially renewed for a second season, it was ultimately canceled after one season as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That sentence is the show’s real ending, and it is a bad one. Not because the pandemic was anyone’s fault, but because The Society was built to pay off a mystery it never got to solve. The first season does the work of a pilot stretched to 10 hours. It sets rules, introduces factions, and then stops.
The performances hold up better than the plotting. Newton is the reason to watch. She plays Allie as someone who keeps taking responsibility because no one else will, and the show is smart enough to make that cost her. Fitzalan’s Harry is the opposite: entitled, then useful, then something else. Adlon and Berdy get the quieter material and do more with it.
Where The Society falls short is in the middle stretch. Ten episodes is a lot of room for a premise this simple, and the show fills it with the same arguments about the same shortages. The mystery of the forest gets less attention than the mystery of who is sleeping with whom. That is a choice, and it is the wrong one for a show whose title promises a society and whose premise promises an answer.
The comparison that matters is not to other teen dramas. It is to what the show could have been with a second season. A renewed show that gets canceled is a specific kind of loss: the writers had a plan, the cast had a contract, and the audience got a first act. The Society is not a failure of execution. It is a failure of circumstance, and the two look identical on screen.
Worth watching? Yes, with a warning. The 10 episodes are competent, sometimes sharp, and Newton is genuinely good. But you are watching a story that stops mid-sentence, and no amount of good casting fixes that. The published critical score lands at 6.6/10, and that feels right: a solid premise, a strong lead, and a hole where the ending should be.
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