The Only Reason to Watch ‘Wilderness’ Is Taylor Swift

There is yet to be an exact title for the genre of books, movies, and TV shows that follow women getting revenge on the evil men in their lives. They’re not always thrillers, but they’re also not merely chick flicks. Sometimes they’re murder mysteries, and they’re almost always dark comedies. Vendetta venture? Tit for tat tale? Ladies, we’ve got to come up with a clever name for this, because there’s a new entry in the canon, which already includes titles like Big Little Lies, Bad Sisters, and Gone Girl, amidst plenty of others.

That show is Wilderness, a British thriller premiering Sept. 14 on Prime Video based on the novel of the same name by B.E. Jones. Our damaged-yet-persistent heroine is Liv (Doctor Who alum Jenna Coleman), a woman who has been told her entire life to sit down, listen, and obey orders. But when Liv uncovers a secret her husband Will (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) has been hiding, she craves the opportunity to fight back and get revenge.

While growing up in England, Liv was always told to follow the unwritten rules of society: Men are the leaders of the house, women belong in the kitchen, and no talking back. Outdated, yes, but Liv has spent most of her life feeling empowered while still falling in line. So, when Will asks Liv to quit her job and move to America to be his New York housewife, she agrees. They’ve been married for a year at this point. The future looks solid. Liv is willing to spend her time at home baking and cleaning, although the women around her warn that being a homebody isn’t a sustainable lifestyle.

Liv and Will act like happy newlyweds. They steal away with each other in the middle of work parties, embrace each other in the elevator for everyone to see. They buy each other nice Christmas presents. Will buys Liv a sleek high rise apartment with granite countertops—for all that baking she promises him. From the outside, Liv narrates, their life looks perfect. But on one fateful night following Will’s return from a business trip, Liv unlocks Will’s phone to see a worrying text: “I’m still thinking about you inside of me x,” apparently sent from his best (male) buddy Sol (Everick Golding).

The text is obviously not from Sol. Will lies, confessing that he had a one-off affair with another woman on the business trip. Liv burns everything he owns while he’s at work, but when Will returns with a pair of tickets for an outdoorsy getaway to Yosemite and other major sites, Liv folds. Oh, how delightful! She’s always wanted to see the American West. Who cares about that lousy affair? As quickly as she torched his blazers, she’s packing her own into a perfect duffel for a weeklong vacation.

But as the trip unfolds, it doesn’t take Liv long to realize that her husband has sprinkled some white lies into his story. The woman he slept with wasn’t random—it was his new coworker Cara (Ashley Benson). Buried in Will’s email inbox, Liv finds a sex tape of the pair at a hotel together. This affair has actually been going on for quite some time. Infuriated with her dolt husband’s wandering eyes, Liv begins to fantasize about killing him along every leg of the trip. Wouldn’t it be so easy to crash the car into a boulder that would only hit his head? What about pushing him into the Grand Canyon? Would anyone dive in to save Will if he were to slip out in the middle of white water rafting?

These imagined kills are fun, and Coleman is ravishing as a wannabe murderess, but the issue Wilderness encounters is that the stakes aren’t high enough to warrant a big death. There was plenty of set up to make, say, Alexander Skarsgård look as evil as possible in Big Little Lies. The best masculine villain is still The Prick (Claes Bang) of Bad Sisters, a conniving misogynist and master manipulator. But Will is dull. His only problems are that he had an affair and he’s bad at lying. Not saying those aren’t life-upending issues for Liv, but to see his downfall isn’t as particularly glorious as it could be if he were, say, a terrible husband with poor manners.

Wilderness offers a quick fix in the form of Cara, who magically appears in the middle of Will and Liv’s romantic vacay, bringing along her dopey boyfriend Garth (Eric Balfour). Garth has no idea what’s going on. But Liv stalks Cara and Will as they sneak away together, flirting at the nearby lakeside views as if their loved ones aren’t right around the corner. While Cara crashing the trip has fun-if-naughty implications at first, the tension flattens in just half an episode. No one actually takes any action to make the Cara/Will spicier than a few winks and longing stares.

What Wilderness lacks is any of the genre blending of Big Little Lies, Bad Sisters, and the other like-minded woman-gets-revenge series. There’s no dark humor, but there’s also no mystery to keep things enticing. The twists are bland—Liv daydreams about murdering her husband, but the plotting is far more interesting than anything that actually happens. Wilderness alone is not enough to send shivers down one’s spine; we’re going to need creepy characters and gripping tension to amp up the thrills.

With that in mind, the most exciting part of the series becomes the opening credits, an artistic portrayal of birds killing prey set to “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift. It’s not the first time Swift’s presence has made a Prime Video series more appealing than it actually is—see also, The Summer I Turned Pretty. Unfortunately, the rest of Wilderness can’t top Swift as a beguiling opening act.

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