Sweet Tooth - New Series Review

Netflix’s original series have always been hit-or-miss, with every Bojack Horseman or Ozark meeting a Hoops or Another Life. And their latest effort, Sweet Tooth, based on the Vertigo comic of the same name, is certainly as hit-or-miss as their entire repertoire. For all the moments of visual beauty and Last of Us-esque intimacy, there’s a lot that’s missing from Sweet Tooth’s first season which would make it a truly great show. But it’s certainly a better option than some of the other dreck on Netflix.

Right, so at the beginning of a global pandemic (ho ho), weird creatures known as “hybrids” with combination of human and animal features are born from humans, leading to them getting blamed and a massacre beginning. A father of one such creature heads into the woods to raise his son alone, until disaster sees the boy walk off into the wild dystopia to find his mother and purpose.

Aside from the coincidence of a global pandemic (which also showed up in another 2021 Netflix original, Oxygen, which I do recommend), Sweet Tooth isn’t going to feel like anything striking or new despite its bizarre-sounding premise. Having come off a number of dystopian films and TV shows, Sweet Tooth tries to be the relatively sugary antidote to the grim that permeates this genre. It’s unfortunately not as effective as another chirpy dystopia like Love and Monsters, mainly due to its story and conclusion.

In regard to narrative, Sweet Tooth aims to have 3 branching narratives and a bunch of other subplots all running around, but these subplots never feel particularly cohesive until the final episodes. They feel like distractions from the main attractive story – the boy running through the wilderness for the first time – and it never feels satisfying to randomly divert to the fate of a random doctor who has not yet any connection. Randomly syrupy and more-distracting-than-effective narration from James Brolin also does nothing to add to the show’s coherence, and the season ends so abruptly and so perfunctorily that I was scratching my head.

However, the writers of this show do absolutely nail character work. The relationship between the boy and his dad (an unrecognizable Will Forte) is excellently told, as is the eventual friendships between the boy and the drifters he comes across, all of whom have strong personalities and backstories to hook on. In addition, one of those arguably unnecessary subplots features the best performance in the show from Adeel Akhtar, playing a morally conflicted doctor forced to choose between murder and love.

As usual, these shows fail with an interesting villain, played as a typical racist caricature (who also distractingly looks like Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog), but most of the characters are rock-solid.

Another thing about this show that I have very mixed feelings towards is the depiction of the hybrids, these human-animal splices that randomly appeared at the time of the pandemic. The main boy, Christian Convery, does a good job at his hybrid performance, and his deer antlers and ears indeed look real. However, the show does not do a good job of world-building around these hybrids. Everybody’s so afraid of them, but rarely do we see striking sights of hybrid discrimination, merely people describing it. Beyond that, it’s clear that many of these hybrids have special abilities and do not spread the virus that caused the pandemic, but everybody swings in full genocide mode rather than try and enslave or use them, something which would be much more powerful.

I also just have to remark on how terrible Sweet Tooth’s prosthetics and special effects are with these hybrids. I said that the main character was okay, but most of the others look like they were ripped from a bad school play, with carnival face-paint and paper lion-manes. Some of the more animalistic ones frankly look like wind-up mice or cheap puppets from a Disneyland gift shop. I cannot believe how bad they look, given Netflix’s reputation for great effects work.

But perhaps the worst offence of this show is its tone. It never settles on whether it wants to be light-hearted and child-friendly or The Road-levels of grim, veering quite sharply between scenes. The powerful and disturbing scenes of human depravity often give way to meaningless scenes of the boy and his protector walking across a beautiful meadow talking about random stuff, and the show keeps a consistently fantastical tone throughout that leaves the viewer somewhat disconnected from the realism that takes up half of the show.

The combination of the many scenes of childish wonder, the low-fi practical effects and use of beautiful locations only makes the return to darkness even more jarring every time it comes, and there are points when you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The original book was acidic and tinged with black comedy, but the show can’t hit that accurately enough to be effective.

Sweet Tooth is definitely not what I’d be telling you to watch on Netflix right now. With both new seasons of Lupin and Tuca and Bertie out to be seen, Sweet Tooth feels mediocre, full of poor tonal shifts and confused writing occasionally soldered together by great acting and character work.

Sweet Tooth’s first season gets a C+.

Maybe they’ll improve in the second season – darker, more sure-footed and figuring out lines between sentimentality and burning houses.

What did you think of Sweet Tooth? Leave your answers in the comments below.