"Every small town has a secret. Ours has a game," teenager Heather Nill (Olivia Welch) intones ominously in the opening narration to the first episode of Panic. Based on Lauren Oliver's 2014 YA novel, Panic is not nearly as dark and mysterious as Heather's description makes it sound. Although its premise sounds a bit like The Hunger Games transported to a modern-day small-town Texas, the game played by the graduating class of the local high school is more like Survivor or Fear Factor than a dystopian nightmare.
Oliver, who created the series and wrote every episode, tries to make the game (also known as Panic) seem dangerous and scary, but the actual challenges are more like an extreme scavenger hunt. Heather explains that the winner of Panic is the only one who gets to leave the small town of Carp, Texas, but it's not like there’s a wall around the town that prevents people from leaving. Anyone is free to go, but Panic awards the victor a cash pot (collected from the entire senior class throughout the school year) that could theoretically allow them to live comfortably.
Like the past winners of the Hunger Games, though, the past Panic champions don't seem to have done much with their prizes. Even worse, the town is on edge because the previous year's games resulted in the deaths of two participants, killed during reckless gameplay. Heather, a bit of a self-righteous scold, is determined not to play, instead relying on her carefully amassed savings to help her pay for a very practical college course in accountancy.
But she's the main character, so of course she'll end up playing Panic, alongside her best friend Natalie (Jessica Sula), town bad boy Ray (Ray Nicholson) and mysterious newcomer Dodge (Mike Faist), among others. Heather's trailer-trash stereotype of a mother pilfers her cash to pay for car repairs, and Heather has no choice but to play the game if she wants to pay for college.
Challenges in the first half of the 10-episode season including jumping off a cliff into a reservoir, walking across a narrow metal plank between two towers at a granary and spending the night in an allegedly haunted house. They're barely heightened versions of typical teenage antics, although the characters treat them with the seriousness of going off to war.
The desperation that the characters experience to win the competition could provide some commentary on the cycle of poverty in Carp, but any social relevance is buried deep under the over-hyped thriller elements. And when Oliver attempts to tackle serious issues, the effort comes off as silly and superficial. Ray gives a speech in the fourth episode about his troubled childhood that feels like a parody of overwritten social-issue dramas.
What's left, then, is a mediocre teen soap opera, full of hook-ups and love triangles and secret betrayals. Heather is the main character, but Panic spends plenty of time with supporting players and even minor characters whose subplots seem designed to expand the plot of the novel into enough material for an entire TV season. Heather is, of course, torn between two love interests. She's drawn to Ray's sleazy energy and feels a kinship with him thanks to their shared working-class background. But she's also pining for her best friend Bishop (Camron Jones), a rich, upstanding kid whose father is a judge. It's hard to imagine viewers caring enough to divide themselves into Team Ray and Team Bishop, though.
Panic also devotes substantial time to the local cops' investigation into the game, led by Sheriff Cortez (Enrique Murciano), whose son was one of the teens killed in the previous year's game. The mysteries are so basic and obvious that the police come off as comically inept for their inability to solve the case, especially when the irresponsible teenagers are apparently always several steps ahead of them. Making the cops into central characters gives the show an anchor to continue on to a new game with new players, but there's very little intrigue to a criminal case built around stunts that the cast of Jackass would reject as far too tame.
The mysteries and suspense would be less important if the characters were more compelling, but the performances are uniformly bland, to go along with their stock characters. There's no heat to any of the romances, and Welch never makes Heather into a compelling hero for the audience to cheer on. It's not surprising for a teen drama to star actors who look a decade older than their characters, although Broadway veteran Faist really pushes believability with Dodge, who looks more like one of the characters' high school teachers than their peer.
As Panic builds to its mild reveals, it shows itself as both more mundane than its initial high concept suggests and too cluttered with gimmickry to sustain meaningful character drama. All the talk about "judges" and "collectors" and the "bagman" makes Panic sound less like a seductive and menacing underground competition, and more like a cheesy game show that could be paired with something like the revival of Legends of the Hidden Temple.
Starring Olivia Welch, Mike Faist, Jessica Sula, Camron Jones, Ray Nicholson and Enrique Murciano, the 10-episode first season of Panic is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
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