Wolf Pack TV Review

Last Updated on February 8, 2023

Plot: A raging California wildfire jumps onto a roadway, trapping a bus full of high school students. Everett and Blake encounter something lurking in the flames and smoke. Luna and Harlan cross the fire line in a desperate search for their missing Park Ranger father, and Kristen Ramsey, a very determined arson investigator, arrives on the scene. 

Review: The same day Jeff Davis’ werewolf series Teen Wolf debuts a long-awaited continuation in the form of a feature-length film, the showrunner also premieres an all-new take on werewolf mythology: Wolf Pack. Based on the series of novels by Edo van Belkom, Wolf Pack is a far different story from Teen Wolf despite both series depicting lycanthropy in suburban areas. Where Teen Wolf centered on the title monsters before expanding into other supernatural entities, Wolf Pack fosters a mythology squarely focused on the werewolves, where they come from, and their purpose. Slowly teasing out how these beasts and their powers exist in this series, Wolf Pack opens with mysteries, sex, and a massive wildfire that propels this tale in a direction much different than other genre television series.

In the first two episodes, Wolf Pack opens during the evacuation from a massive wildfire in the Los Angeles area. We first meet Everett Lang (Armani Jackson), a teen who suffers from extreme anxiety as he struggles to control himself while riding the bus to school. When he and classmate Blake Navarro (Bella Shepard) learn school is canceled, a herd of wild animals lunges out of the forest at them, resulting in wolf bites on the teens. After being taken to the hospital, strange sensations happen to Everett and Blake. At the same time, siblings Harlan (Tyler Lawrence Gray) and Bella (Chloe Rose Robertson) worry about their adoptive father, Garrett (Rodrigo Santoro), who may be trapped in the growing blaze.

In returning to genre television, Sarah Michelle Gellar is being marketed as the big name attached to this series, but she appears in less than 5 minutes between the first two episodes of Wolf Pack. Gellar plays arson investigator Kristin Ramsey, who seems to know a bit more about the blazes cropping up around Los Angeles and directly targets Blake and Everett. It is difficult to discern if she knows about the werewolves or if her connection is different. Still, Gellar’s character could easily be an ally to the teens or a solid antagonist. She shares many scenes with Lanny Joon (Baby Driver), who plays menacing cop Jason Jang. Neither Gellar nor Joon seems to be the source of the mysterious phone calls that Blake and Everett receive from a distorted voice warning them about a threat on the horizon. Could this threat be by a different pack of wolves or something more human?

There are some big positives and some negatives to the first episodes of Wolf Pack. Having only screened the first two chapters of this story, it isn’t easy to gauge the context of the story. With the framing of the wildfires, Wolf Pack drops the viewer right into the story’s heat with little chance to get acclimated. We meet several characters, and the teens are all in challenging personal situations. Everett struggles with his overbearing mother, Blake takes care of her autistic brother, and her father struggles as a single parent. At the same time, Harlan and Luna harbor the secret of their wolven origin as the full moon brings them together. Luna seems to be the most grounded and balanced of the four teens, while Harlan spends most of these two episodes engaged in promiscuous sex. Harlan also seems like a blatant course correction for creator Jeff Davis, who has often been criticized for weakly depicting LGBTQ characters on Teen Wolf. The adult characters are pretty thin in the early going. Rodrigo Santoro and Sarah Michelle Gellar are not on screen enough to judge their role in the narrative.

While the series is hard to gauge this early, the dramatic elements in this series feel far more mature than Teen Wolf despite the main characters still being high school-aged. Because the series is streaming on Paramount+, there are no restrictions regarding profanity or violence. The nudity is squarely PG-13, but some violence pushes the envelope compared to Teen Wolf. With direction from Jason Ensler, Davis and his writing team lift the young adult-centric source material and raise it to a slightly more mature audience. Wolf Pack looks more cinematic than Davis’ previous series but still struggles with CGI wolves that look underwhelming. Most visual effects are limited to glowing eyes and fangs, but they look unrealistic when fully rendered animals are seen. Nevertheless, this series does not rely too heavily on CGI in the first episodes, but that may change as the season continues.

As far as teen-centric genre series go, Wolf Pack does away with the cheesier elements of Teen Wolf while building an alluring mythology around werewolves that is different than what we have seen before. These early episodes set up an ensemble of characters in different places, with the tease of them all coming together to battle a supernatural threat. If the balance of screen time remains the same for the entire season, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Rodrigo Santoro’s involvement may feel like a false promise. Still, the four young leads in this series have enough presence and chemistry that they should instill enough confidence for fans to stick with this one. Violent, sexy, and mysterious, Wolf Pack has a long way to go to prove it is worth investing in for multiple seasons, but there is solid potential in these first chapters.

Wolf Pack premieres on January 26th on Paramount+.

Wolf Pack

GOOD

7