What Prime Video’s “The Wilds” Teaches Us About The Female Experience

In December 2020, Amazon’s streaming service, Prime Video, premiered the first season of it’s new teen drama show “The Wilds”. To an outsider, this show may seem like some sort of angsty teen drama version of “Lost”, but anyone who has actually watched it will tell you otherwise.

“The Wilds” follows a group of 8 (well, formally 9) teenage girls who get stuck on a desert island when their plane crashes while en route to an all-female retreat in Hawaii. However, what the girls don’t know is that the plane crash has been staged and is an orchestrated social experiment by the head of the “Dawn of Eve” program, Gretchen Klein.

Each girl in the main cast of characters, nicknamed “The Unsinkable Eight” has an episode that tells their backstory and the reason they’re going on this retreat. Gretchen has picked these specific girls for a reason. Her whole social experiment is designed to prove that women are more capable of handling stressful situations than men and can come together to create a peaceful, utopian society. I believe that the reason these girls were chosen is because they all have a negative experience with men, or the patriarchy, so Gretchen thinks they are the perfect subjects to prove the negative effects of toxic masculinity, and it’s influence on our society.