Prime Video’s The Wilds opens with a plane going down over the ocean, and that is the least honest thing that happens in its 18 episodes. Created by Sarah Streicher, the series strands eight teenage girls on a deserted island and lets them believe they got there by accident.
They did not. The crash was staged, the island was chosen, and the whole ordeal is a social experiment run by Gretchen Klein, the head of a young women’s empowerment retreat called Dawn of Eve. The girls were on their way to that retreat when the plane went down. That is the trick the show plays on them, and the smarter trick it plays on us.
Trailer, via Prime Video.
Eight Girls, One Staged Crash
The castaways are Fatin Jadmani, Dot Campbell, Martha Blackburn, Rachel Reid, Shelby Goodkind, Nora Reid, Toni Shalifoe and Leah Rilke. They come from different backgrounds, they clash, and they bond. The show cuts between the island, flashbacks to their lives before the crash, and flashforwards to an underground bunker where two men claiming to be FBI agents, Daniel Faber and Dean Young, interview the survivors after a supposed rescue.
That three-way structure is the engine. The island gives us survival. The flashbacks give us the secrets and the traumas each girl carried onto the plane. The bunker gives us the lie, because Faber and Young are not telling the girls what they are part of.
The performances are the reason any of this holds. Sarah Pidgeon plays Leah Rilke, Sophia Ali plays Fatin Jadmani, Shannon Berry plays Dot Campbell, Jenna Clause plays Martha Blackburn, Reign Edwards plays Rachel Reid, Mia Healey plays Shelby Goodkind, Helena Howard plays Nora Reid and Erana James plays Toni Shalifoe. The show asks a lot of them, and they carry it.
The Bunker Is the Best Idea Here
The flashforward interviews are where The Wilds stops being a survival drama and starts being something with teeth. Two men with badges sit across from girls who have been through hell, and the audience knows more than the girls do. That gap is the whole show. It is also the part that makes the island scenes feel like more than a genre exercise.
Rachel Griffiths plays Gretchen Klein, the architect. The show does not reveal her as a monster in a single scene. It lets her sit at the edge of the story, running a program with a name that sounds like a gift, while the girls fight over food and water and trust on a beach they cannot leave.
Season 2 Adds the Boys
The second season introduces a group of teenage boys: Kirin O’Conner, Rafael Garcia, Josh Herbert, Seth Novak, Ivan Taylor, Henry Tanaka, Bo Leonard and Scotty Simms. They are in Klein’s second orchestrated crash, this one tied to a program called Twilight of Adam. The boys get the same treatment, flashing between their past, their island and questioning by Faber and Young.
Meanwhile the girls, still held in the bunker, start to work out the truth and try to reach the boys. That is the right move for a second season. It widens the experiment instead of repeating it, and it turns the bunker from a framing device into a plot the characters can act on.
The new cast includes Zack Calderon as Raf García, Alex Fitzalan as Seth Novak, Charles Alexander as Kirin O’Conner and Nicholas Coombe as Josh Herbert. The season was cast in May 2021, with the first-season regulars already in place.
What the Show Gets Right
The Wilds is at its best when it treats the experiment as a machine rather than a mystery. The girls are not just lost. They are watched, sorted and studied, and the show keeps that pressure on even in scenes that look like ordinary teen drama. The flashbacks earn their place because they explain what the experiment is measuring.
The writing also refuses the easy version of this story. These girls do not become a smooth team. They form factions, keep secrets and hurt each other, and the show lets that stand. Praise for the performances, writing and plot followed the first season, and it was renewed for a second season in December 2020.
Here is the ranking of what actually works, in order:
- The bunker interviews, which give the show its dread and its structure.
- Rachel Griffiths as Gretchen Klein, the calm center of a cruel plan.
- The flashbacks, which turn each girl into a person instead of a type.
- The island survival scenes, solid but the most familiar material.
- The boys’ storyline in season 2, a good expansion that arrives late.
- The Twilight of Adam parallel, which never gets the room it needs.
Where It Slips
The second season has a load problem. It has to service the girls in the bunker, the boys on their own island, two sets of flashbacks and two sets of interrogations. That is a lot of machinery, and the boys’ half of the story does not get the same depth the girls got in season 1. Their pasts come through, but thinner.
The show was canceled in July 2022 after two seasons, which means the story ends before the experiment does. That is the real wound here. The Wilds built a mystery around a program with a next phase and a next group, and then stopped. The girls get closer to the truth. The boys get their story told. Nobody gets the ending the setup promised.
That is not a flaw in the two seasons that exist. It is a flaw in what we were handed. A show that spends 18 episodes teaching you to distrust the people running the experiment should not leave you wondering whether anyone was running the ending.
The Verdict on The Wilds
The Wilds is a smart, well-acted drama that uses a genre premise to ask a nastier question: what happens when the people who claim to be helping young women are the ones studying them? The first season is the stronger of the two because it stays tight, keeps the cast small and lets the bunker do the heavy lifting.
The second season is more ambitious and less controlled. Bringing in the boys doubles the show’s reach and halves its focus. It also sets up a third act that never came. Sarah Streicher’s series ends on a cliff it built itself, and the cancellation means we will not see the drop.
Still, the performances hold, the structure is clever, and Gretchen Klein is one of the better villains television produced in this stretch. The show knows exactly what it is doing with its central lie, and it does not blink. That counts for a lot.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.