The Teen Wolf Squee Post
Yeah, so, I have gone and got myself horrendously addicted to this show called Teen Wolf. This is your inevitable squee/rec post that, as always, remains brief and to the point at a mere 3000 words. *hangs head in shame* Let's get this over with.
The short version: Despite its cunning disguise as post-Twilight teen-garbage, Teen Wolf turns out to be not only well-plotted, clever and an edge-of-your-seat viewing experience, it also caters to my id on a level I hardly have words to describe. It's greatest failing is that it is not yet more than two shamefully short seasons long.
The long version:
Our heroes in a nutshell
A visual aid. Left to right: Lydia, Jackson, Stiles, Scott, Alison and Derek.
Scott McCall is a regular loser teenage boy until he’s bitten out in the woods one night and finds himself transforming into a werewolf (as you do). Scott is in the slightly awkward position of being played by the one actor in the show who doesn’t wow me in the slightest (Derek is also a little shaky in early S1, but has grown into the role beautifully since), but as teen show leads go he’s still not half bad.
Stiles is Scott’s wisecracking best friend, not that that does him justice when he’s effectively more like Scott’s Willow and Xander and gay-best-friend all in one slightly-hyperactive package (not that Stiles is actually gay, but suggestions are that he’s probably not entirely straight either). The more I see of Stiles, the more convinced I am that he could pretty well carry the whole show single-handedly. There are many other characters in this show who I like very much, but I am known to forget they exist occasionally when Stiles is on screen.
Alison Argent is Scott’s obligatory love interest, though they’ve been involved barely ten seconds before we learn she’s from a family of werewolf hunters, because there’s no story without conflict. While I long to see Alison get past her (completely justified) hang-ups and grow into the certified badass she will surely someday be, on the whole everything about the Scott/Alison thing is much more interesting than you’d expect.
Lydia Martin and Jackson Whittemore are, collectively, the Most Popular Arsehole Couple In School, which is to say that they are both seething messes of neuroses poorly concealed under a façade of perfect confidence. Initially, their role in the series is largely to make Scott’s life more difficult, though by the end of season 1 they’re both thoroughly mixed up in all the show’s supernatural nastiness in their own rights. All early bullshit aside, I've been finding increasingly fond of both of them the longer the show goes on.
Derek Hale is self-evidently Teen Wolf’s answer to Angel, which is to say that he’s the ridiculously attractive brooding, loner vampire adult werewolf, only without Angel’s finely developed social skills. While he’s nominally supposed to be helping Scott muddle his way through his new double-life he’s not really very good at it, or, for that matter, much of anything that requires voluntary communication with other sentient beings. While his backstory easily puts all his issues in perspective, I dealt with him initially only by concluding that Derek is, at heart, just another idiot teenager inexplicably living in a slightly larger mountain of abs than the rest of them, and similarly underqualified to deal with the challenges of life as an adult. It is possible I would have more trouble forgiving Derek for his many and varied screw-ups if he wasn’t so ridiculously pretty and so prone to losing his shirt, but he is (I mean, damn) so… uh, y'know, I forget what point I was making, where am I again?
How this all adds up to a show that is much better than it sounds, and why you should all check it out:
The short version: Despite its cunning disguise as post-Twilight teen-garbage, Teen Wolf turns out to be not only well-plotted, clever and an edge-of-your-seat viewing experience, it also caters to my id on a level I hardly have words to describe. It's greatest failing is that it is not yet more than two shamefully short seasons long.
The long version:
Our heroes in a nutshell
A visual aid. Left to right: Lydia, Jackson, Stiles, Scott, Alison and Derek.
Scott McCall is a regular loser teenage boy until he’s bitten out in the woods one night and finds himself transforming into a werewolf (as you do). Scott is in the slightly awkward position of being played by the one actor in the show who doesn’t wow me in the slightest (Derek is also a little shaky in early S1, but has grown into the role beautifully since), but as teen show leads go he’s still not half bad.
Stiles is Scott’s wisecracking best friend, not that that does him justice when he’s effectively more like Scott’s Willow and Xander and gay-best-friend all in one slightly-hyperactive package (not that Stiles is actually gay, but suggestions are that he’s probably not entirely straight either). The more I see of Stiles, the more convinced I am that he could pretty well carry the whole show single-handedly. There are many other characters in this show who I like very much, but I am known to forget they exist occasionally when Stiles is on screen.
Alison Argent is Scott’s obligatory love interest, though they’ve been involved barely ten seconds before we learn she’s from a family of werewolf hunters, because there’s no story without conflict. While I long to see Alison get past her (completely justified) hang-ups and grow into the certified badass she will surely someday be, on the whole everything about the Scott/Alison thing is much more interesting than you’d expect.
Lydia Martin and Jackson Whittemore are, collectively, the Most Popular Arsehole Couple In School, which is to say that they are both seething messes of neuroses poorly concealed under a façade of perfect confidence. Initially, their role in the series is largely to make Scott’s life more difficult, though by the end of season 1 they’re both thoroughly mixed up in all the show’s supernatural nastiness in their own rights. All early bullshit aside, I've been finding increasingly fond of both of them the longer the show goes on.
Derek Hale is self-evidently Teen Wolf’s answer to Angel, which is to say that he’s the ridiculously attractive brooding, loner vampire adult werewolf, only without Angel’s finely developed social skills. While he’s nominally supposed to be helping Scott muddle his way through his new double-life he’s not really very good at it, or, for that matter, much of anything that requires voluntary communication with other sentient beings. While his backstory easily puts all his issues in perspective, I dealt with him initially only by concluding that Derek is, at heart, just another idiot teenager inexplicably living in a slightly larger mountain of abs than the rest of them, and similarly underqualified to deal with the challenges of life as an adult. It is possible I would have more trouble forgiving Derek for his many and varied screw-ups if he wasn’t so ridiculously pretty and so prone to losing his shirt, but he is (I mean, damn) so… uh, y'know, I forget what point I was making, where am I again?
How this all adds up to a show that is much better than it sounds, and why you should all check it out:
- Teen Wolf is basically the show I wish had been on TV when I was figuring out my own sexuality
Not only is TW a show where the wisecracking best friend is heavily implied to be in the process of figuring out that he's bisexual, but where the 'token' gay guy in the supporting cast is not just out but on the football lacrosse team, one of the most popular guys in school, and best friends with the obligatory Arsehole Popular Jock character (Jackson). I have repeatedly seen TW referred to as being set in a wonderful parallel universe where homophobia doesn't exist, and while I don't disagree on principle, I'd posit that it's closer to being a universe where homophobia is a thing of the past. If anything 'homophobic' is the new 'gay' - at least in the sense where we've seen people respond with shock and frantic back-pedalling at the first suggestion that something they said or did might have been taken as a sign of closet homophobia. Guys expressing attraction for other guys, on the other hand, is treated as merely another shade of normal. It is wonderful.
- It is laser-targeted at the female id in a manner I did not think mainstream producers even knew about
It's not just about the incredibly hot guys with the abs of a male gymnast parading around with their shirts off (though believe me, this helps). It's not just about how the gloriously queer-friendly world of Teen Wolf was just about made to welcome the slash-loving contingent in with open arms (though believe me, this helps). It's the way they've gone the extra step beyond the happy land of equal-opportunity fanservice by virtually excising the male gaze problem that plagues virtually everything else on our screens from their show altogether. They've done this so effectively that a female character on Teen Wolf can have a shower scene and all we see of her is a few tasteful shots of her face or her feet; and when another shows up at school sexed-up after a supernatural makeover, we still get through the whole reveal without a single T&A close up (and even what's left feels a little out of place). It's like the producers have actually realised that their primary demographic is women, many of whom would kill for a show that can bring the sexy without making us feel like pieces of meat, and elected to give us undisputed priority. This is a thing that really happened in the real world.
But it doesn't stop with the pretty.
Teen Wolf is a show where half the conflict isn't good vs evil but about rivalries between opposing groups where no-one is entirely wrong and everyone is sympathetic. There are all kinds of tense, short-lived alliances between characters who don't agree with or even much like each other but who've been forced to team up against the greater evil. There are characters who are clearly written to be absolute woobies under their wisecracking and/or douchebag exteriors. It is an honest-to-god plot point that werewolves need packs - that they are physically and supernaturally stronger when they have that support - and that humans can be part of the pack too. (For the One Piece fans in the audience, yes, we are talking nakama-bonding in all its glory. For the Homestuck fans, I swear I have as many morrail-ships for TW as true redroms.) People on this show care about each other, and between all the tensions and teenage stupidity and understandable mistakes that get made while their lives are going to shit, they're remarkably good at showing it too.
I am not used to being pandered to on this level by anything outside of the best kind of slashfic.
- It is also tightly plotted in a way I have seriously never seen on TV before
Teen Wolf is a show without filler. Things take a little while to get up to speed initially, and the characters do still get their periods of downtime between catastrophes and still find time to make it to class once in a while right up to the finales, but once the plot gets started it never stops. Things barrel along so fast that several times I found myself thinking, 'wait, they're revealing that already? What are they going to have left for the rest of the season?' I shouldn't have worried. There's always so much going on at once that both seasons feel packed to the seams - season 2 had me on the edge of my seat pretty much continuously from episode 1 - and if anything, could probably have done with being another episode or two longer. Things have to get moving early because otherwise they'd never have space to finish. If anything, neither season even got to resolve more than the most pressing of the many, many ongoing plot points raised over the course of the arc, but I have full faith that this is only because things are being left for season 3 (which, for the record, cannot happen soon enough, omfg).
On the subject of the writing, it would be remiss of me not to mention how TW plays with the clichés of the supernatural-high-school-horror genre - because while they're all there (for serious, the main cast are the Hero, The Wisecracking Best Friend, The Juliet Love Interest, The Most Popular Bitch In School, The Arsehole Popular Jock and the Mysterious Broody Outsider), often as not it's turning them on their heads. Teen sex is dealt with with minimal fuss and basically zero slut shaming. Everyone has been established as a likable character (or at the least, if YMMV, as sympathetically messed up without overdoing the angst) within the space of the first 12 episodes. Everyone gets to be smart once in a while, or at least demonstrate the basic common sense that has long been anathema to virtually everything else in the genre. For example, when our heroes find themselves trapped in the school in the middle of the night with Something Nasty murdering the janitorial staff, one of the first things they do is phone the police (this fails because the monster involved is smart enough to have phoned ahead to prime the police to assume it's a prank call), followed by getting the guy who happens to be the Sheriff's son to phone his dad directly (alas, he gets the voicemail), and the stakes feel only higher for knowing the enemy is smart and the good guys are not in fact Too Dumb To Live. I'm even enjoying the obligatory lead boy/lead girl romance after two full seasons of romantic fluff interspersed by awkward break-ups, and that's one hell of an achievement.
- ...though lord knows I'm not about to try to convince you it's flawless.
Fair's fair, and the sordid tale of my decent into Teen Wolf-madness would not be complete without noting that I only got invested on my second try, because introductory episodes did nothing for me. (The turning point, if you're interested, involved an extensive foray into the loads of amazing fic being produced by the fandom during that week I spent mostly bedridden with a terrible cold, followed by the investigation of what youtube had to offer in the way of music videos, ultimately followed by me giving the show another shot. This would all be much more hilarious if it was the first time I've done this, but it's not even close, so eh.) I've seen S1E4 recced as a good intro point but it only frustrated me personally (Goddamnit Stiles, I realise you have no reason to like him and you are under a lot of stress, but do you really have to keep bitching about Derek bleeding on your upholstery while he's dying in your car?). It took another couple of episodes beyond that before I felt the show really hit its stride, but once its there it hardly put a foot wrong for the next season and a half. I was sold by around ep 9, hooked by the start of season 2, and thoroughly addicted by the end of it.
It's also only fair to admit that the special effects and fight choreography are not the high points of this show. They're basically functional in that camera angles and lighting are well-used to hide the worst of it, but there are still times when it's a little too easy to feel like you can see the exact budget that was allocated to SFX, and lordy it is not high.
I remain very slightly torn over the issue of how the show handles its female characters. While I could wax poetic about what an amazing job it does developing the ones it has and subverting the usual clichés, there's still the thing where they're all built from a foundation of high school tropes, leaving us with the Love Interest, the Mean Girl and, in season 2, the Sexy Female Werewolf. This third incident got to me the worst, especially when the contrast between her transformation into a total babe and the two new boy-wolves' transformations into musclebound sports stars was so hard to ignore, but by the end of the season she'd grown on me enough that it seemed petty to complain that the writers are opting to play with our expectations before subverting them rather than subverting them right out of the gate. As the show clearly exists to pander to my id and my id alone, I must confess myself a little disappointed that the cast does not yet include a confident badass girl-wolf with ridiculous muscles and funky hair. But realistically speaking, when you realise that this specific complaint is your biggest remaining issue with a show, it's time to accept that you've already won.
Getting down to the even pettier complaints, season 1 did leave me frustrated with the show's apparent fixation with giving its girls long, flowing, Hollywood hair - which every girl who is not actually a velociraptor seemed to have, and which no-one ever tied back, not even when out practicing archery or hunting werewolves and ffs my suspension of disbelief only goes so far. >( As of season 2, however, I think we've come to a compromise on this account: Alison and Lydia have learned some very pretty new braid styles, and Alison has taken to at least tying her bangs back while out being badass in the woods, and my rage on the matter is sated.
On one less petty note, I did find the conclusion to season 2 just a little frustrating on a few accounts: [which I will do my best to describe in as vague terms as possible, but I'll spoiler the whole lot out anyway to be on the safe side.]
Basically, even if Scott was hardly alone in screwing up or making questionable decisions this season, in the end he felt like he was the only one not punished for it. He lied to Derek about his reasons for joining his pack, he let Alison feel horrible about sharing information with her family while he was apparently doing the same thing, and I am really not buying his 'you're not the boss of me' speech as much explanation for why he kept his ace-in-the-hole secret from everyone including his allies. The framing and in particular Deaton's lecture about trusting Scott suggests we're supposed to see any misunderstanding as Derek's fault, but ffs Derek's first girlfriend murdered his whole family except himself, his sister and his uncle, and his uncle came out of his six-year coma as a psychopath and promptly murdered his sister. If, with all that baggage, Derek 'only' trusted Scott enough to be mildly uncomfortable with his behaviour, rather than completely and unconditionally, what else did you expect? Maybe if we'd seen a little more of Scott's reasoning it would have worked better for me, but as of right now I'm finding myself uncomfortably at odds with what the show seems to want me to think, and mostly just hoping it gets addressed early next season.
But mostly that one gripe stands out to because otherwise, the whole of season 2 was close to being a continuous win for me.
- And yeah - let‘s come right out and say it - it's also the show where signs are that fandom's darling slash pairing might just have a snowball's chance in hell at becoming canon
Do not adjust your sets, this is not round #9072 of the-endless-slash-baiting-that-goes-nowhere, this is not a drill. This is the show where one of the actors described the odds of the ship becoming A Real Thing as 'probably 50/50' and the producer has described open letters in favour of the subject as 'beautifully written'. I reiterate: this is a show set in a land where people are allowed to be gay, and where the audience are all here for the boy-candy. Nothing is guaranteed, but the possibility exists, and I anticipate remaining glued to my screen as the situation develops.
Owning my own bias on this one, I ship it like the motherfucking Titanic. There may not be anything in seasons 1 or 2 which overtly screams 'madly in love', but they have great chemistry and it's all too easy to picture them being good for each other. (And at the risk of sounding like a completely ridiculous fangirl on the subject, well, yeah, I can't deny that, but that open letter linked to above really does make the case beautifully for why seeing characters who are individually so well-developed as these guys progress naturally into a same-sex relationship on mainstream TV would mean so much to so many of us, srsly.) However, should nothing come of it... I don't think it would bother me too much, because for all that I am aboard the Good Ship Sterek, they represent only a fraction of everything I love about this show, and if the showrunner feels it would mess with the character arcs he already has planned, I have a whole lot of faith I'll still love what we get.
And that, in brief, is why you should all give this show a try.