By: Jim Williams
Senior Columnist – Capital Sports and Entertaiment
Whether you’re a fan of their thoughtful rom-com Feel Good or their stand-up (think: 2023’s SAP), you’re probably used to Mae Martin making you laugh. Well, prepare to see a whole new side of the Canadian comedian, because Martin’s thriller Wayward is is here. You can get a peek into the secrets ahead with the trailer, seen above.
The limited series whisks you to Tall Pines, a bucolic town where nothing is what it seems. Martin created Wayward, and is also the drama’s co-showrunner, executive producer, and star. Their co-stars include Pieces of Her’s Toni Collette, Alias Grace’s Sarah Gadon, and many more familiar faces, like the Suits maverick Patrick J. Adams. The trailer cracks open the door to Tall Pines Academy, a fictional school where questionable methods abound and trust is in low supply.
“I often talk around adolescence, or I write characters who are processing their teens. It was such an intense time for me, and is for everyone, but I’ve always known I wanted to more directly dive into that time and all the visceral feelings of adolescence,” Martin tells Tudum.
Also, Martin drew from their own experiences. “I was a wayward teen in the early 2000s, and my best friend was sent to one of these troubled teen institutes when she was 16,” explains Martin. “She came back and had just the craziest stories about it.” Their interest in that delicate time eventually led Martin to research the “troubled teen” industry; they funneled that curiosity into Wayward, which centers around the disturbing reality of one such facility. Enigmatic Evelyn Wade (Collette) is the leader of Tall Pines Academy and wields the volatile brand of “self-reflection” practiced at the facility.
Martin and co-showrunner Ryan Scott were inspired by everything from Girl, Interrupted to Get Out to Fargo as they built Wayward. Martin says, “It’s like if you took the kids from Booksmart and put them in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
What is Wayward about?
In the picture-perfect town of Tall Pines, sinister secrets lurk behind every closed door. Not long after police officer Alex Dempsey (Martin) and his pregnant wife Laura (Gadon) move into their new home, Dempsey connects with two students, Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) from the local school for “troubled teens” who are desperate to escape, and could be the key to unearthing everything rotten in the town. As Alex begins investigating a series of unusual incidents, he suspects that Evelyn (Collette), the school’s mysterious leader, might be at the center of all the problems. Created by Martin, Wayward is a thrilling and genre-bending limited series about the eternal struggle between one generation and the next, what happens when friendship and loyalty are put to the ultimate test, and how buried truths always find a way of coming to the surface.
At the center of the show are stars Topliffe and Lind as high school best friends “who are sent to one of these schools and are kind of trying to maintain their sanity,” Martin explains. “But then on top of that, we added a genre element. Wayward has a ton of metaphors for the systems that we all participate in as adults, and how much of our empathy and critical thinking we have to suppress in order to just live in the world. I think that all the characters are grappling with that in this show.”
Although the stakes for Wayward’s teenagers are dire, the series maintains Martin’s signature humor and is both scary and heartfelt.
