Wayward Breaks Every Thriller Rule for One Brilliantly Unexpected Reason
Mae Martin’s chilling Netflix series Wayward keeps you off-balance at every turn — and that’s exactly the thrill.
Major spoilers ahead. If you want to go into Wayward clean, bail now. If you’re still here: let’s talk about how a twisty small-town thriller manages to be surprisingly, seamlessly queer without turning that into the twist.
Welcome to Tall Pines, where everything is just a little too nice
Wayward drops us into Tall Pines, a postcard-perfect town with picket fences, big smiles, and a school that runs like a cultishly efficient machine. Everyone’s friendly to the point of uncanny. The principal is so relentlessly chipper it reads as a threat. You feel the off-ness immediately.
The hook: Mae Martin plays a trans cop in a genre that usually weaponizes that
Series creator Mae Martin (yes, the Canadian comedian from Taskmaster and Feel Good) stars as Alex Dempsey, a police officer poking into a string of troubling disappearances connected to the local school. The curveball isn’t that Alex is a trans man; it’s that the show doesn’t use that as a source of doom or melodrama. Alex moves to Tall Pines to be with his wife and nobody blinks. A fellow officer welcomes him into the so-called brotherhood and, at first, you assume that kind of instant acceptance must be a red flag in a town this Stepford. But as the story spirals, it turns out the rot here has nothing to do with transphobia or homophobia. The town is messed up for completely different reasons.
Queerness isn’t the plot device; it’s the world
Alex doesn’t hide who he is, and he also doesn’t make speeches about it. Wayward isn’t a capital-Q Queer Drama about identity; it’s a nervy, sometimes funny psychological thriller where the lead just happens to be trans. That alone is rarer on TV than people think. Even better, the show folds this in with small, matter-of-fact beats: Alex uses his T-shot routine as a handy excuse to duck out and investigate. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it detail that says a lot without turning it into The Topic.
The joke that only works because the show earns it
"Cops just swing their dicks around," Abbie jokes to her friend Leila.
"I don’t think [Alex] has a dick," Leila shoots back.
In a different series, that exchange could land as crass. Here, it plays like an in-universe joke from characters who live in a world that’s already queer to the bone. Leila is bisexual, and the show quietly suggests many characters aren’t straight either. The vibe is inclusive without the neon sign.
About the bodies, the sex, and why it matters
From the pilot onward, Martin appears shirtless, and there’s a frank, memorable sex scene with Alex and his wife. In a moment when trans bodies are routinely othered, filming this couple’s intimacy with that much clarity is quietly radical. Also, yes, it’s hot. Thrillers should sweat a little.
No saints, no monsters (well, not just the obvious ones)
Wayward refuses to canonize or demonize its queer characters. Everybody lives in the gray, morally and otherwise. And that includes the literal gray-green sludge of Tall Pines (if you know, you know — tadpoles and all). The show is more interested in complicating people than sermonizing about them.
The ending: the escape you think you saw isn’t the one you got
Just when it looks like Alex escapes town with Abbie and his newborn, the rug gets yanked. That happy ending? Not real. The truth is harsher: Alex lets Abbie down and chooses his new family over doing the right thing. The show doesn’t frame that choice as some commentary on queerness; it’s about the messy calculus of love, safety, and self-preservation.
And yes, the family at the center — a trans man, his queer wife, and their baby — is foregrounded and celebrated. The community even cheers them on, which would be sweet if the community weren’t mostly cult weirdos now following Alex’s wife. It’s a celebration… with an asterisk the size of Tall Pines.
So what is Wayward actually doing?
It keeps twisting the knife on what you think a small-town nightmare looks like, while casually redefining what a mainstream thriller family can be. Honestly, that might be the queerest thing about it. The series re-bends genre expectations with an unapologetically outsider angle — and yes, it sneaks in actual thrills, actual scares, and even a few Mufasa one-liners because why not.
Where to watch
Wayward is streaming now on Netflix. Plans start from £5.99/month. Netflix is also available via Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.