TV Series Review
by Abbie Morrice
4/5
If you’re sick of indie teenage dramas with cliched characters and a predictable soundtrack, then ‘Wayne’ is the perfect programme for you. Starring ‘Sing Street’s Mark McKenna as Wayne (and some familiar faces from ‘Brooklyn 99’ and ‘Glee’), ‘Wayne’ tells the story of the titular character on a mission to get back a car that rightly belongs to him, and leads him on a journey from Massachusetts to Florida. But very quickly you forget that this is the driving force behind the episodes, as the layered characters and sub-plots keep you far more interested. An episode centred around Wayne’s partner-in-crime Del almost left me wondering why the programme wasn’t about her in the first place, so I’ll knock off half a point for falling into the trap of letting the ‘damaged-goods’ girl only be the minor character – partially forgiven because Wayne’s character arc is on par. The show is thoughtfully shot, and the attention to colour scheme contributes nicely to the theme without trying to force a creation of its own aesthetic. At worst, there is the occasional drop of the Massachusetts accent and some flatly delivered lines, but these kinks are mostly worked out after the first episode. The soundtrack is fantastic and manages to fit in Vanessa Carlton’s ‘A Thousand Miles’ at an unexpected but perfect moment. Without pandering, Wayne also manages to cover social issues like class struggles and police incompetence in the USA – as well as a sub-plot about dogs which will keep anyone rooting for a happy ending. Wayne feels more like a film than a series, but this is not to its detriment; it balances the repeated tension of a series with the clear start-middle-end structure of a film that got a tear out of me at the last hurdle. Feeling a lot like ‘The End of the F*cking World’ and coming from the writers of ‘Deadpool’, I strongly believe you’d struggle to find someone that didn’t enjoy ‘Wayne’. The Deadpool-like humour seeps through the dialogue and into the editing, leading to several genuine laugh-out-loud moments and great action scenes. The only problem is that it’s only available on Youtube Premium, which pretty much no one has because there’s nowhere near the choice available on Netflix. But go get your free thirty-day trial and binge Wayne; you’ll struggle not to finish it in a day or two anyway.
