Hell hath no fury like a pop stan scorned. This may as well be the tagline for the new Donald Glover series Swarm, based on the bloody trailer that dropped Friday morning.
If you’ve been on the internet over the past few years, you know that fans of pop artists can either be the funniest or most terrifying demographic (usually, the latter) to engage with. It feels appropriate, then, that Glover, a proven master of horror and comedy, would take on this social media archetype in his first post-Atlanta venture.
If it wasn’t obvious from the title, the Prime Video series—premiering at SXSW on March 10 and hitting the streamer on March 17—is a not-so-subtle wink to one stan army in particular. In the trailer, we see The Deuce star Dominique Fishback obsess over a Black female musician named Ni’Jah whose fans profess their love through bee emojis. In one scene, Fishback is gazing at a poster for the fictional singer’s “Running Scared II” tour. In another, she’s using a new credit card to purchase $1,800 concert tickets. (If you still don’t know whose fanbase the show is referring to, her name rhymes with fiancé.)
Fishback’s protagonist, Dre, is a lot more unhinged (hopefully!) than the average stan replying to random people on Twitter. Repeatedly, through a voiceover, we hear Dre ask someone, “Who is your favorite artist?”—sounding more and more threatening each time. The trailer also features plenty of blood, including a scene where Dre’s mopping a gallon of it from the floor while dancing. In another moment, Dre stops a woman from opening the trunk of her car. When another person jokingly asks if she’s “got a dead body in there,” she erupts in a maniacal laugh.
The show also boasts some illustrious faces, including R&B singer Chloe Bailey as Dre’s best friend, social media star Rickey Thompson, and even Paris Jackson. If Swarm is anything like Atlanta—and it certainly resembles the FX series aesthetically—we can expect some funny, potentially award-winning moments for each of its guest stars as well as Fishback, who gives a deliciously depraved performance in the trailer alone.
In recent Vanity Fair article, Glover described Swarm as a “post-truth” mix of the French erotic film The Piano Teacher and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. The multi-hyphenate pitched the idea to Janinne Nabers, who’d worked with Glover on Atlanta and HBO’s Watchmen; she told the mag that she was particularly excited to tell an anti-hero story through the uncommon “lens of a Black, modern-day woman.”
With a dynamic showrunner in Nabers and a stacked cast, Swarm feels destined for critical-darling and even Emmy-nominated status. Still, the reaction from the BeyHive might be more fascinating to observe. Suffice to say, the stars of Swarm might want to preemptively turn off their Twitter mentions.
