Mae Martin Breaks Television Ground in ‘Wayward’

Mae Martin may have achieved a television first. Not only have they transcended genres by producing a 2 season lesbian romcom and a psych-thriller miniseries, but they have also transcended gender itself by playing a woman in the first and a trans male in the second. Because somewhere along the way, Mae Martin switched genders.

This is at once of no importance and of central importance when evaluating Martin’s latest Netflix offering Wayward that follows Feel Good (2020), their previous, NME Award-winning sitcom from Netflix where Martin carefully traced the contours of a budding romance as a straight woman struggles to adapt to falling in love with another woman.

Wayward is a tightly-plotted eight episode psychological thriller penned by Martin in which they play Alex Dempsey, a small town police(trans)man with a pregnant wife and a massive problem. The entire town of Tall Pines into which the young family has relocated seems to be under the sway of a hippie era mind control cult that has flourished in backwater Vermont, a locale that is part Twin Peaks and part Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Teen runaways vanish. Disturbing connections emerge between Alex’s wife and a murdered commune leader. And weird dreams unsettle everyone’s sleep.

The entire spooky zeitgeist seems to emanate from the principal’s office of Tall Pines Academy, the local school for delinquent youth that is less Dead Poet’s Society and more MK-Ultra black site. As Evelyn, the school principal and senior therapist, Toni Collette provides ample focus and dramatic distraction from Martin. Deadly secrets, suppressed memories, gunplay and serious brainwashing shenanigans ensue.

The canvas of Martin’s imaginative landscape is impressively broad. In Wayward, Martin combines the teen experience, an innovative psychological mystery and a solid police procedural to produce a tale in the vein of The Manchurian Candidate and The Ninth Configuration. Add to this: reflections on the how parents and children relate, how newcomers are treated in a small town, and the LGBT experience, and the characters are ever richer as Wayward draws us through a labyrinthine yet compelling narrative.

Central to the plot of Wayward is how generational trauma impacts identity formation. And thus, we return to the fascinating subject of Martin.

Mae Martin’s journey of identity and gender transformation represents the cultural story of our moment, and its importance cannot be untethered from the importance of Wayward as a cultural artifact. Television is a reflection of culture. We have seen television used to challenge and question culture. We have seen it report monumental occurrences to global audiences. And we have seen it used, as it was in the first wide-scale television broadcast, to disseminate nationalist propaganda. Now we see a brilliant creative mind – one of the most nimble of the decade – use her own gender transformation as a story element in a televised drama about personal identity. To claim this is anything less than groundbreaking is to completely miss Martin’s cultural significance.

Our era has been typified by an emphasis upon group identity, its only concession to the individual being that individual’s level of conformity with their chosen group. But what of the inner workings of the individual themselves? Immersed in the stew of identity politics, we can sometimes overlook the more intimate terrain of personal identity, a theme woven tightly into Wayward‘s narrative.The delinquent children sent to Tall Pines are flawed. Evelyn, proposes to fix them via a punishing regimen of personal abnegation, rigorous privilege earning and opportunistic snitching that culminates in a hallucinatory, drug induced psychodrama called the Leap.

The Leap is sometimes referred to by characters as “growing up.” This raises the question of what it means to “grow up,” both within the context of the show itself and within the broader culture it is meant to reflect. Family is one critical aspect of culture that impacts identity formation. Like a family, Tall Pines has its secrets and is prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to protect them, sometimes to the detriment of its members. This raises the question of what point Martin may be making about identity formation within family structures.

Trust returns as a central issue in Martin’s work. In Feel Good, Martin exposed the critical role trust plays in identity formation George, her love interest, is taking the first steps into a queer identity and must rely on Mae to support her through the process. That theme is deepened in Wayward. Treachery is endemic to the culture at Tall Pines Academy and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and Abbie (Sydney Topliffe), the two teens thrust into its dysfunctional ecosystem, find their friendship fracturing under the weight of dissonance combined with Evelyn’s mind games. Without their stabilizing connection, both girls flounder, but their friendship flourishes anew once trust is regained by their cooperation in open mutiny against the school in plotting the takeover of a campus building. The leap of faith implied in that risk rebuilds their friendship, thus underscoring one of Martin’s favorite themes.

Counterposed against trust is fear, the key ingredient in Evelyn’s relationships. Again, we see an intriguing parallel to Feel Good where the connection between Mae and George, her female love interest, is thwarted by fear – the fear keeping Mae tethered to addiction and George clinging to the closet. It is when both characters overcome these obstacles to rebuilding trust that the relationship regains momentum. In Wayward, we see these same psychological truths drawn more starkly in the quasi-therapeutic environment of Tall Pines Academy. Martin, themself a recovering addict, is well equipped to explore the inner world of those in turmoil. For a world where the results of fear and trust are so crucial, their clash as witnessed on television work is compelling.