Wilderness Review: Better Off Staying Home

Prime Video's "Wilderness" looks like a fantastic show: It has famous actress Jenna Coleman — a "Doctor Who" companion! — in the lead role, well-known actor Oliver Jackson Cohen as her adoring husband, and expensive and lovely locations from New York City to the American West for the pair to perform in. Yet the reality is very different. This show is a slog from start to finish, and I keep coming back to the question of who this show is for and what they must have gone through to make it appealing to them.

"Wilderness" is the story of Olivia "Liv" Taylor (Coleman), a journalist from Wales who, when we meet her, can't work because she's agreed to move to New York City so her husband Will (Jackson-Cohen), whom she just married, can accept a promotion. Liv is left to her own devices while her husband goes to work. Then one day soon after they move, when her husband is showering, she sees evidence of an affair on his phone. She immediately calls him on it, and the fight they have ruins Christmas dinner.

Liv is especially damaged by this revelation because cheating is what ruined her parents' marriage. Still, she takes him back when he assures her it was only the one time and it won't happen again — and he buys plane tickets for a trip across the United States. But then she finds emails that indicate he's regularly sleeping with someone else on his laptop. She follows the woman; running after her in the park, going to the same nightclub, tracing her steps to the gym, and finally, beating her to her husband's room at the hotel where he works.

She doesn't say anything about the affair to Will, though, and goes on the vacation with him as if everything is fine. She has the outlines of a plan that involves killing him, although she isn't sure how she's going to do it. Then in Yosemite, they meet Cara (Ashley Benson) and Garth (Eric Balfour) on the same trail. Cara just happens to be the woman that Will is sleeping with, and even though Liv feigns ignorance, her interest is piqued. What follows could be described as an increasingly serious game where, eventually, the winner takes all the cards.

The problem is that the whole thing is so absent of anything resembling fun that the show isn't enjoyable. I don't expect a show about adultery to be a laugh-a-minute, but this show manages to make the whole enterprise seem flat. This is a product of both the writing and the acting. Writer Marnie Dickens (assisted by Matilda Feyisayo Ibini in the fourth episode), who is also the show's creator, has a vision for this series and she writes to that, but she can't quite bring out the sloppy emotions and tough feelings that the piece demands. For example, if Liv didn't say that she still loves Will at one point, I wouldn't know it.

The acting has problematic moments as well. Although Coleman is a talented actor, she can't manage the requirements here. Maybe it's the sweet way she looks, but I didn't buy for a moment that she's capable of some of the things that she's required to do in this show. As a result, it seems like things are happening to her more than she is doing things for a particular purpose.

While this is less the case with the rest of the cast, there were still many times that they seemed lost too. For instance, Jackson-Cohen's Will must have a reason for wanting to stay with his wife so badly, even when he's cheating on her, yet he doesn't do a great job articulating it. He says something about his parents at one moment, but as things get worse, he still insists they stay together. Past a certain point, this seems like madness. And then there's Balfour's Garth, who seems to have a personality transplant in his last episode. The directing (by So Yong Kim) and writing don't do anything to ease them over these breaks in logic and the show suffers for it.

The title "Wilderness" is a bit of a mystery, as the most wilderness we see the couple venture into is the trail at Yosemite. Perhaps this is different in the book of the same name on which this is based, by B.E. Jones, but here "Wilderness" seems to refer more to the wilds where Liv goes emotionally. The thing is that her emotions aren't so strange; if anything they're rather familiar to those who've experienced a similar situation. Or perhaps they are different than average, yet they just aren't portrayed that way.

At the end of the show, Liv refers to herself as a "bunny boiler," a direct reference to "Fatal Attraction." Except she's not a vengeful lover, she's the wife; she has a right to expect her husband to be faithful to her in a way Alex Forest (Glenn Close) in "Fatal Attraction" never did — but she doesn't seem to realize that. She may be capable of doing wrong things because of the way her man has behaved, but she is still, at least in part, the wronged party, making her conundrum that much more complicated.

That's the problem with "Wilderness." Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do," the song that plays over the credits of the show, channels Liv's rage better than the series' six episodes. While the show promises to be a juicy story of infidelity, by taking the perspective of Liv, the wife who starts off as the innocent party, the story almost guarantees it won't work without a lead who can channel rage and savvy as well as she can channel hurt and anger. I applaud this show for having a female-driven team, but it doesn't communicate its points clearly, and in the process, manages to squash all pleasure out of its story.

"Wilderness" premieres Friday, September 15 on Prime Video.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn't exist.