Everyone is a bit too friendly, the local school a little too efficient… And the chatty principal of the school? Far too nice, with an eerie smile endlessly plastered across her face. It all feels a bit uneasy, deliberately so, which is why it’s so surprising that the one aspect of this story which does fit in perfectly is queerness, despite the sinister, small-town setting and genre at hand.
OK, it shouldn’t be that surprising if you’re even slightly familiar with the work of series creator Mae Martin, who also stars as Alex Dempsey, a police officer investigating some troubling disappearances at the local school.
Fans of Taskmaster or the Canadian comedian’s semi-biographical dramedy Feel Good might already be aware of how Martin explores their non-binary identity in their work. But even so, a genre-blending psychological thriller like this might be the last place you’d expect to see Martin navigate such themes. And what’s even more surprising is exactly how Martin goes about this.
It would have been easy to play off the horrors that so often come when queer people are forced to return to their hometown, or any small town for that matter. There’s a reason so many of us migrate to cities, after all, often as an escape from the bigotry that – not always – but often comes in the rural parts of pretty much any country.
But after Mae’s character Alex joins their wife in Tall Pines, no one bats an eyelid at his identity as a trans man. When a fellow cop instantly accepts Alex into the “brotherhood”, it’s hard not to wonder if this so-called acceptance might be part of the wider facade that’s hiding something dark and rotten at the heart of this town.
However, as the series progresses, it becomes clear that this isn’t actually the case at all.
Yes, it turns out that Tall Pines is all kinds of messed up, but the problems at hand have nothing to do with intolerance or hate (at least when it comes to queer and trans identity).
Alex never hides who he is, and he never feels the need to talk about it lots either. This isn’t a queer drama about the struggles or even joy of being trans. Instead, this is an occasionally funny nightmarish thriller where the main character just so happens to be a trans man.
Non-conforming gender identities are rarely seen on screen as it is – and much less than some would have you believe – but what’s even rarer is to see these themes incorporated so organically in a wider genre story that has nothing to do with queerness at all.
When Alex pretends to be taking his testosterone shots as an excuse to escape and further his investigation, it’s a small detail that normalises trans identity without making it the focus. Not that there would be any issue in doing so – these stories are hugely important and valid too – but there’s something to be said for normalising such experiences in this current climate especially.
There’s an exchange around the midway mark between two teenagers called Abbie and Leila where the former jokes that, “Cops just swing their dicks around,” while the latter suggests “I don’t think [Alex] has a dick.”
In another show, this could have come across as distasteful or even disrespectful, but Wayward is queer through and through, so jokes like this hit differently here (especially given Martin’s key involvement in the writing itself). Leila is bisexual even, as many of the characters are suggested to be.
It’s not just through language or visibility where Wayward champions this, though. From the very first episode, Martin regularly appears shirtless and even naked in one particularly memorable sex scene between Alex and his wife. At a time when trans bodies are regularly othered, framing Martin’s sexuality so viscerally with so much nudity is groundbreaking in and of itself. Plus, it’s hot, and what would a thriller be without at least one moment as steamy as this?
But what’s perhaps most impressive about Wayward is how it neither demonises nor idolises queer characters like Alex. While some people in the show are more monstrous than others, they all exist in the murky greys of good or bad, right or wrong. And I’m not just talking about that icky tadpole water either.
Looking at the series as a whole, that’s what makes the ending in particular so special.
Because just when you think Alex has escaped Tall Pines with Abbie and his baby in tow, it turns out that this happy ending the show tricks us into seeing wasn’t actually real at all. The truth is that Alex lets Abbie down, choosing his new family over doing the right thing.
It’s never framed in a way to make you think Alex is selfish because he’s queer. If anything, it’s quite remarkable to see a queer family foregrounded in a show of this nature, made up of a trans man, his queer wife and their newborn child. In fact, the family is actively celebrated by the entire community, and sure, it’s mostly made up of cult weirdos now led by Alex’s wife, but it’s a celebration nonetheless.
Nothing is what it seems in Wayward, twisting and bending our expectations throughout. And that might be the queerest thing of all about this show, which redefines mainstream notions of family and genre with a delightfully queer outsider perspective. More than the thrills or the scares or the Mufasa one-liners, it’s this that helps set Wayward apart in the best way possible.
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