Teen Wolf

It’s now a perfectly acceptable and polite conversational question in office life to ask people what boxsets they are watching, just as you might ask them if they’ve had a good weekend or been on any nice holidays recently.  For a large part of 2017, however, my answer to this question was Teen Wolf.  Every time somebody asked me, I chose to sacrifice credibility in order to give a truthful answer, ignoring all the exquisite TV I had curated and devoured.  But if you’re going to watch shows that seem to be aimed at teenage girls, you might as well be honest about it.  Especially if you thoroughly enjoy them.

This question was posed to me on one occasion by friends while on holiday in South Korea.  Without much to do of an evening in Pyongchang, having eaten in every restaurant available and swum in the very safety-obsessed swimming pool where everyone is forced to wear a cartoon character-emblazoned life jacket no matter how good they are at swimming, my response of Teen Wolf was this time met with such enthusiasm, that we were soon settling down for episode one of series one with plenty of snacks and drinks.  There are very few shows I would want to watch again, with Game of Thrones being almost the only exception, but returning to early episodes while knee deep in series five did give me a new appreciation of the programme.

In the UK, Teen Wolf was buried in the late night schedule of Channel 5, but I first came across this MTV production on DVDs sent to me by the now-defunct Lovefilm service.  I appreciate this sounds like happenstance, when in fact I did deliberately add them to my list.  These DVDs are actually linked to further personal embarrassment.  On a Saturday evening in 2013 after moving house earlier the same day, I managed to electrocute myself while plugging in a lamp whose power cable was falling apart.  Giving up on unpacking and retreating to bed with a boxset, modern life’s known cure for everything, I was later found enjoying the exploits of Scott McCall and friends by my flatmate, who barged in to introduce me to his new girlfriend, whom I then met for the first time, in my twenties, in bed at nine thirty on a Saturday evening, watching Teen Wolf.

The premise of the show will not be dwelled on here.  If you can’t guess that it’s about a high school student who becomes a werewolf, then you should probably be watching a soap opera on one of the main channels or something.  While series one is able to trace the full arc of lead character, Scott, coming to terms with his new powers, in spite of quite a low production budget for his various transformations, this is soon exhausted.  Therefore, later series revolve around his band of friends also finding out they have their own special supernatural powers, not unlike the Scooby Gang in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Credit should be given to the cast for looking sexually attractive in any form of fantasy peril the show’s writers put them in.  No lip is unglossed, no hair is out of place, and no excess body fat is ever to be seen.  Scott’s school extra-curricular activity of lacrosse leads to a vast quantity of gratuitous toplessness, and almost every villain and supporting character loses their clothing due to their supernatural powers, metamorphosis, adverse weather, or a combination of all three.  Additional credit should be given for their ability to drop in a whole array of nonsensical-sounding mythical terminology that can render whole hours of the show more or less impenetrable to a casual viewer.  Banshee and alpha I can handle, but try keeping up with kanima, nogitsune, nemeton and you soon lose the will.

But none of this matters, as this is good, clean, sexy fun.  Levels of violence are low, so any fight scenes typically revolve around characters throwing each other at the floor from various angles, something you can see that the crew has given up trying to find new interesting ways to film.  Viewers can enjoy thinking of ways to be sexual with the cast while joining them on supernatural storylines that revel in their own silliness.  So the next time someone asks what you’re watching and you want to look cool, sure, say The Wire, Narcos, or Breaking Bad and be like everyone else, or surprise them with something they’ll never be expecting.