Netflix's Sweet Tooth more than earns its sweetness

The Hollywood Reporter

"Whimsical tweeness is a personal — or perhaps generational — kryptonite," says Daniel Fienberg." For every Pushing Daisies or Wonderfalls, there are a dozen TV shows and movies undone by thinking that 'unfiltered sincerity' and 'treacly earnestness' are interchangeable. Some predisposition toward the saccharine is necessary to properly consume Netflix’s new fantasy Sweet Tooth — I mean, it’s right there in the title — but there’s great pleasure in reporting that for most of Jim Mickle’s adaptation of Jeff Lemire’s Vertigo comic, a precarious balance is handled with real deftness. Emotionally and geographically, this is a show with real epic scope, and it earns the laughter and occasional tears that it wrings from the audience thanks to a real and unquestionable, well, sweetness." He adds: "A quick skim of the plot should reveal that while certain elements in Sweet Tooth have a distinctive quality, it’s a very traditional story within the folkloric realm. With no trouble at all, you’ll spot elements of The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan and half of the Disney roster. The expansive backdrops provided by shooting in New Zealand — so many verdant fields and perilous chasms — make Lord of the Rings comparisons inevitable as well. From there, you can see dollops of whatever your favorite road sagas are with winsome kids and gruff, reluctant guardians, whether it’s Lone Wolf and Cub or Willow or, fittingly, The Road or Mad Max. It’s all packaged from a child’s perspective like a Spielbergian yarn from that moment in the ’80s when the expectations for young-skewing entertainment didn’t necessarily require exclusive juvenile pandering; Sweet Tooth is awash in sadness, is occasionally scary and people say 'sh*t' at least three times, if that’s the kind of thing that freaks you out."

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• Sweet Tooth is an apocalyptic modern fairy tale with a beautiful heart: "Every living thing on this planet shares the imperative to survive and reproduce," says Alexis Nedd. "Plants exist to grow seeds and scatter them, animals lay eggs or give birth, and viruses mutate to infect more hosts and spread. Life is the game and those are the only rules. The rules themselves have no moral value, but what is done in pursuit of survival and reproduction can improve lives or deal irreparable harm. Sweet Tooth on Netflix is a beautiful and complicated imagining of a world where life's rules changed overnight and humanity lost their game."
• Sweet Tooth finds a lot of novel ways to surprise an audience that has seen probably too many shows about the end of the world at this point: "Many of its best moments come when a heroic character has a daring plan that seems sure to work … and then spectacularly fails to carry it out," says Sam Thielman. "In others, characters who die in early episodes go on to meet cute, flirt and live the better parts of their lives in flashbacks we get to see. Sweet Tooth is always threatening to get too dark or too saccharine, but somehow it never swerves too far in either direction. Lemire’s comic was horribly prescient about a great deal: His cover painting for issue #7 is of helpless kids from the series’ animal-child underclass behind a chain link fence, their fingers laced through the wires. Today, it could practically be a news photo of the U.S.’s increasingly cruel immigrant child detention practices; several scenes of the comic are set in what might as well be one of ICE’s 'baby jails.' Thankfully, (co-showrunner Jim) Mickle tends to establish grim settings in the series and then use them as stages for jokes; at one point, a character on the verge of being killed by his neighbors refers to them as 'savages with better haircuts' and everyone glances over at another of their number, who definitely has the nicest haircut in the mob. But more interestingly, Mickle and his team weave the principal characters' histories together in a way that seems meant to engender sympathy for all but the worst of them. Mickle, it sometimes turns out, already has us rooting for people before we see them doing some really bad things."
• Much of Sweet Tooth's success depends on Christian Convery: "If the audience doesn’t feel an instant degree of affection for Gus, very little of it works," says Alan Sepinwall. "Convery makes Gus seem cute but not cloying, innocent but not naive, likable but not too perfect. It’s an impressive balancing act from such a young performer, and scenes with him bring out the best in (Will) Forte, (Nonso) Anozie, and Stefania LaVie Owen (as Bear, leader of a cult that reveres and protects the hybrids). Whether Gus and friends are having scary adventures or fun ones, those parts of Sweet Tooth are full of life, and as exciting or tense as needed. The show can be hit or miss, though, when it moves away from Gus, and those subplots not coincidentally tend to work best the closer they stick to his childlike worldview."
• Sweet Tooth shouldn’t work at all, but it does: "Somehow whimsy, paranoia, sometimes brutal action and hard-pressed affection find a pleasing tonal balance throughout the first season’s eight episodes," says Bob Strauss, adding: "Sweet Tooth presents an atypically verdant end of the world, washed in green and pretty, worrisome flowers. It all boils down to a multifaceted, if bizarre, examination of family and what that means, considered not just in traditional and surrogate unit form, but all the way up through tribe and sect to species. Some pretty heady ideas here for a kids show, but then family entertainment, like so many things in 2021, is evolving in ways that we haven’t seen before."
• Sweet Tooth isn't perfect, but it looks better than many other Netflix fantasy series: "The depiction of young people as literally a different species from their elders, fighting for their right to exist in a world that doesn’t understand them, is a somewhat simple metaphor, but it would be churlish to deny its elemental power," says Daniel D'Addario. "Throughout, the show is made with a surprising degree of curiosity about what changes in society would look like across varying sorts of communities, and with a capacious imagination to boot. And while it envisions a world transformed by illness and pain, Sweet Tooth feels fundamentally light of touch and, well, sweet of intention. Its pandemic-riven world has been torn apart, to be sure, and in the wake comes dissension — but kindness and connection, too. Change provides the opportunity for grand-scale reimagining of what life can look like or be, as well as small opportunities to come into one’s own — to find one’s humanity, even when wearing deer antlers."
• Sweet Tooth ends up resembling a fairy tale of sorts, with lush visuals and colors that pop, despite all the death and destruction on the edges: "So much of Sweet Tooth relies on the performance of Convery, but the young actor is immediately likable, as we see this new world through his eyes of wonder and questioning," says Ross Bonaime. "Gus is a character that has to be just irritating enough at times so that we understand why Jepperd would want to get rid of him, but also delightful enough for us to want to follow his massive adventure. It’s a delicate tightrope act Convery has to pull, yet he never falters as the heart and soul of this story."
• Sweet Tooth manages to thread the needle: "Much of the early concern around a show like Sweet Tooth — a fantasy adventure based on existing I.P. that targets all four quadrants while ostensibly posing as a kids’ show — is that it will either be sweet to the point of saccharine or awkwardly imbalanced in trying to please too many audiences," says Ben Travers. "Kids can’t watch a show that’s too violent (and they won’t watch one that’s too complicated), while parents typically can’t stomach anything that tugs on the heartstrings so hard that their eyes roll out of their head. (Well, they can’t handle it when it’s live-action.) Thankfully, and somewhat in spite of itself, Sweet Tooth manages to thread the needle. (Or thread the floss?) ....The eight-part Netflix series follows a 'hybrid deer-boy' (their words) who travels across a post-apocalyptic America in search of his mother, alongside a former pro football star whose past sins are far darker than helmet-to-helmet penalties and a young girl who started an army of animal-hybrid wannabes. If that sounds like a lot, well, sometimes it is — humanity is nearly wiped out by a viral pandemic called The Sick, for instance — but don’t worry. On paper, Sweet Tooth sounds as weird and different as a few of the CGI hybrid babies look (prosthetics all the way), but it should feel familiar (in mostly comforting ways) to anyone older than the deer-boy named Gus (Christian Convery). After all, just like Gus himself, it’s structurally engineered to connect with children."
• Sweet Tooth is either genius or atrocious: "I would invite you to watch Sweet Tooth with an open mind and, ideally, a large drink inside you and another one to hand," says Lucy Mangan. "For I cannot for the life of me tell if it is the worst thing I have ever seen, or the greatest work devised for the entertainment of humankind." Mangan adds: "Sweet Tooth is part fantasy, part sci-fi, part whimsy, part cold-eyed realism and most points in between. It is either warmly eccentric or hysterically crazy, perfect entertainment or a horrifying attempt to parlay the pandemic into a commercially palatable mashup. It is undoubtedly aimed at a younger-than-full-adult audience; my 10-year-old is entranced. I am, too, although I can’t yet work out why."
• Sweet Tooth starts slow, and it’s better off for it: "Early on, the show doesn’t seem too concerned with the larger mysteries of the sickness, the hybrids, or how the two connect," says Andrew Webster. "There’s a side story involving a troubled doctor that becomes more important later on, but for the first few episodes the show is almost entirely about Gus. First, his almost idyllic life at home, as he celebrates birthdays with new books and handmade stuffed animals. The vibe is warm and comforting, with lots of cozy sweaters, wood cabins, and roaring fireplaces — and just a hint of danger lurking in the background. (Executive producer Amanda Burrell previously described the show’s aesthetic as 'storybook dystopia.') Even after he ventures out into the big, scary outside world, things aren’t particularly dark; this isn’t the kind of post-apocalyptic world littered with discarded bodies and horrible monsters. It’s our world, just a bit quieter and greener. And with a few roving gangs."
• Sweet Tooth's Gus looks exactly like the protagonist of Fall Out Boy’s first major music video, “Sugar We’re Goin’ Down": Jeff Lemire has said the similarities are accidental
• Sweet Tooth took an analog approach to visual effects, using CGI only when necessary: The Netflix fantasy drama employed puppeteers, such as "ear wrangler" Grant Lehmann, who used a remote control setup to create some mischief. “When someone was a bit green, and I knew it was the first time I’d seen them, I’d just hold off and not do anything while they were talking to Christian,” says Lehmann. “Then I’d pick my moment to make the ears move and get that little jump-back shock from them.”
• How the pandemic impacted Sweet Tooth: "The pilot was already shot before the pandemic and we had broken the first season," says co-showrunner Beth Schwartz. "We were in the writers’ room for two-and-a-half months before the pandemic started, and we switched from the actual writers’ room to the Zoom room. We didn’t change our storylines because the show isn’t really about the pandemic. It’s more about Gus’ journey to find his family and the aftereffects of what a worldwide pandemic can do. There were some details in terms of production that we were able to have more of a shorthand (with) because people know what it’s like to be living in a pandemic. We have some signs that say, 'Six feet apart,' those kind of things that people can get right away. For some episodes, we were conscious of not having a ton of extras, but we didn’t really change our storylines at all."
• Why Sweet Tooth put Gus at the center of the story: “The tone that I think that we kept throughout the whole season is just the heart and the hope from Gus,” says Schwartz. “He’s the anchor of the show. And I think everything kind of grew from that in terms of, you know, obviously the visual tone of everything just being stunning and gorgeous, but the heart of our characters and them feeling real and the scenes of trying to find a family. And I think that kind of became more important than the backdrop of the post-apocalypse.”
• Sweet Tooth wanted to show a different kind of dystopia: "I kept (thinking), 'If the world tipped over right now, it would actually be nature of all things that would thrive and come back,'" says co-showrunner Jim Mickle. "Pretty soon you start looking at what does it look like in Chernobyl, for example, where all of a sudden it's like this horrible thing happened and now it's covered with flowers and amazing foliage and that started to feel like there was a fairy tale or storybook aspect of these dark times that yield these amazing yet bold visual results. The hybrids, in general, are that (on Sweet Tooth). This pandemic comes and this next species comes that lives even in more harmony with the planet. All that spun around and found a new way to look at what the end of the world might look like on-screen."