A couple of years ago I saw a trailer for a show that looked interesting, and which seemed to focus on a teenaged boy beating the hell out of bullies. The show was Wayne and the notion was certainly appealing (comeuppance is my milieu, for certain) but since it was premiering on a service I had no intention of getting (YouTube Premium), it slipped from memory.
It recently showed up on Amazon Prime, a service I don't really need but quite enjoy, and one I have used a fair bit this year to avoid perusing multiple shops in search of harder-to-find items (I still try to shop local for most things, but the Bezos has his teeth sunk in me pretty deep, I'm afraid). Anyhow, we are still trying to get caught up on The Expanse and after finishing The Great (another wonderful but racy show featuring Dakota Fanning as Catherine the Great and Nicholas Hoult as Peter the II or III, depending on what's needed) I stumbled upon Wayne in the "you might like" listings, and Glory and I thought it was worth taking a gamble on.
Ten episodes later, we are hooked and are re-watching it now with Audrey and Fenya (when study breaks permit) and we are desperately longing for a second season. Hence my writing this post in the futile hope that my ten of readers might check it out and hopefully spread the Gospel of Wayne throughout the land, so that the new ownership can greenlight at least one more season.
Be warned - this is not a show for the faint of heart! Two episodes in, you will have witnessed a number of fairly brutal but non-lethal beatings (many of which the titular hero is on the wrong end of), arson, a shotgun blast to the face, a game of stabscotch that goes horribly awry and a chainsaw maiming. Two teenage runaways, Wayne and his would-be girlfriend Del, are at the center of almost all of these misadventures, but this is by no means a love story - it is the tale of two young people with no hope looking to escape two tragic but distinct situations, with no assurances they will find love along the way.
Looking back at the comedies I grew up on, it is astonishing to me how little attention modern television - network, streaming or otherwise - pays to lower-class characters. Shows like All In the Family, Good Times, Sanford & Son and others depicted a greyed-out and occasionally hardscrabble lifestyle that protagonists had to sometimes game around or work a little harder in order to find happiness (and often did!) and which we see very little of nowadays. In fact, with the exception of Roseanne from almost a quarter-century ago, comedies or tv series in general about working-class families have not exactly lit up the scoreboard - unless, of course, they are animated, like The Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, or King of the Hill.
The backgrounds that Wayne and Del come from in Brockton, Mass. are, frankly, ugly and depressing and very real. The cost of arts and crafts supplies can be the trigger for a fierce argument or the opportunity for surprising tenderness. Having a car is a big deal, not just a middle-class incidental. In fact, the premise of the show is Wayne leaving home to find the car of his father that his mother and her boyfriend took off with when he was five. When his bedbound, cancer-ridden father shows him a picture of his beloved auto, Wayne smiles in wonderment and says (in his Bahstan accent), "You had a cah?"
The two protagonists are not driven by cuteness or romance, but desperation, and do not act like miniature adults nor hormone-driven children. At 16 and 15 respectively, Wayne and Del's backgrounds have given them a maturity not seen in the teens of John Hughes' Shermer, Illinois, but they maintain an adolescent focus on short-term solutions that is at once terrifying and occasionally...enviable?
But for all that grimness and brutality, Wayne has a lot of bright moments, even if a lot of the laughs are vengeful and cathartic and often hard-won. Wayne is an individual who simply cannot abide to see people get away with things at the expense of others, which, as you can imagine, makes it easy to gin up moments that are both dramatic and occasionally hilarious. The dialogue is sometimes reminiscent of a Coen brothers movie, with attention paid to regional accents and dialects as the two teens carve their way down the eastern seaboard from Brockton to Florida. There are absurdities galore but the plot is never advanced by stupid people and only requires a minimum of contrivance or coincidence to bring the various characters together.
And such characters! A fatalistic and cynical high-school principal accompanied by Wayne's sophomore huckster confidant, a square police sergeant convinced Wayne may need a second chance and his soup-blogging subordinate, and Del's troubled, bullying father and her two idiot brothers, all need a reason to intersect as Wayne and Del gradually converge on Ocala, Fla., and Wayne's dad's gold 1979 Trans Am, as well as his mom. But what then?
The showrunners also deserve full props for their great musical cues and offbeat selections, including a pitch-perfect if unprecedented usage of Rush's "Working Man."
Wayne is strange and sweet, brutal but compassionate, a bizarre but not surreal blend of Ferris Bueller's Day Off by way of Pulp Fiction. A lot of the laughs are derived from the brutal and direct manner in which Wayne interacts with his challenges, and his struggles to right perceived wrongs he encounters, but practically every character gets an opportunity to showcase their pain and the way they are dealing with it, which was not really something the trailer prepared me for:
Yes, the language can be foul, the violence occasionally shocking and brutal, but Wayne is a rough show with a good heart, very much like its main character. Unlike a lot of similar shows with youthful characters, I have a hard time imagining what the future holds for Wayne and Del, but it is made extraordinarily clear that a happy ending is by no means assured, and perhaps even unlikely. I'm compelled to see how the story unfolds and would very much like to see a second season, so by all means, check out the trailer, watch the show, and please, tell your friends.
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