EXCLUSIVE: The Wilds’ Sarah Streicher & Amy B. Harris Talk What’s to Come on Season 2 of The Wilds
Season 2 of The Wilds is now out on Prime Video and we got the chance to speak with the show’s Creator/Executive Producer/Writer, Sarah Streicher, and the show’s Executive Producer/Showrunner/Writer, Amy B. Harris.
During our interview, we talked the addition of the new characters, balancing the storytelling, when they started working on Season 2 and so much more. Check out what the lovely ladies had to say below.
There’s a lot of tension featured in this season and we get to watch how the boys handle tension compared to how the girls handle tension. Can you talk about these differences and the choices you made to showcase these differences?
Streicher: “One thing that really lends the greatest deal of tension among the boys is an event that very deeply divides them. Really honing the character’s reactions in specific ways. There’s been surprising turns of allegiances in the wake of that contentious event. And, really that speaks to how complicated the terms are around it and how many different viewpoints. I’m speaking in vagueries because I’m trying not to speak to the event itself, but I think the women have had such a beautiful journey despite a lot of the problems and on the boys island, this event kind of just soaks up all of the energy for them. There’s a beautiful community that they could have made as well, except it kind of didn’t get to come to the fore because of what happened.”
Harris: “What’s so interesting about what we’re playing with. Sarah obviously spoke to the tension that’s created on the boys island from a specific event. Season two, I’m so intrigued by what we’re playing with on the girls island, because we keep talking about it as sort of their emotional survival is at stake. Whereas the boys are sort of, at least at the beginning where the girls were last season, which is how do we find food, shelter, water, and what I really love about the show and what Sarah built is that these islands really are metaphors for coming of age. Sometimes when all your needs are met things don’t necessarily go better. Sometimes you crack under the emotional, psychological weight of the things you’re going through. I was very intrigued by that as the other part of the journey that were on this, the boys, this fractious sort of breaking apart. And then the girls kind of imploding, as the things from their past and the things they’re being asked to do in their present really come to haunt them.”
Why did you feel it was important to add the boys into the new season?
Harris: “Well, we really tried to tell the story authentically and honestly, and I think Gretchen very wisely realized a control group has to happen. Because if all she shows is a group of women doing a good job, they could argue men would’ve done the same. Once we started chasing what would she actually be doing? It was very clear to us that the boys island had to come. And we were excited about those stories because we shave been telling these female coming of age stories. Now we’re getting to see the boys, I think as a count… they’re only, to us, they’re the counterpoint to these girls’ stories, which for us was a very fresh way of telling coming of age stories for boys and for girls.”
Streicher: “We are following Gretchen’s story and really what she needed to execute this experiment. As I was writing season one, I did develop some emotional reactions and some memory wellsprings about the men in my coming of age experience. And when we weighed this, I was excited to develop the boys [story]. So often it’s, the male experience is defacto, default. The women’s experience is some kind of corollary counterpoint, but we’ve flipped it here. And I sense among the fandom that there’s pushback and I hear that so deeply and I would be too, it’s sort of like, who’s invading my show, but I hope that when they see that the women have been the forerunners and this is another lens on the coming of by age experience, I think it should be a compelling watch and we dearly hope it will be.”
With the addition of the new characters, how did you balance the storytelling?
Harris: “Well, just from a very practical standpoint, we did start these very complicated mapped timelines of how many days the girls had been on the island and how many days the boys had been on the island. We had a lot of math to do and sort of like setting and plotting in a very specific way for that. And then the terror for me was, Sarah had done such a beautiful job of fleshing out these amazing women on the island. Then that cast brought them to life in such a beautiful way. Casting. Once we knew we had characters, we were excited about, we built these characters and we knew how to drive their story. The casting was very scary for me because I thought, well, if we don’t find men who deliver the way that those women did, it’s going to be disappointing and really shout out to our casting director, Deanna [Brigidi], who just so beautifully helped us on the journey to finding these actors.”
How far into the first season did you both realize you wanted to introduce the boys in the second season?
Harris: “We were probably at around episode four or five when we started to talk about… I’m such a scaredy-cat superstitious person. I’m too afraid to think season two, while I’m working on season one and to Amazon’s credit, they were like, we love the show, we really want to encourage you to think about past this one season. And obviously Sarah had arced out a general idea of what she thought could happen, but we really started drilling down I think about halfway through the season on… The control group would show up at the end of this season as a pretty shocking cliffhanger and that the show could handle the weight of actually bringing them into the fold in season two, as opposed to sort of an afterthought down the road. So yeah, I think it was about halfway through. Does that sound right to you, Sarah?”
Streicher: “Yeah, I think it was the end of the mini room and we were going into the bigger room, yes.”
Over the two seasons, you have thrown together people who hang out in very different cliques. Was that done purposefully or just for a creative reasons?
Harris: “What Sarah did in the pilot was brilliant, which is, I think Gretchen was protecting herself from criticism. I’m not putting together eight like-minded people who will coalesce immediately. That was a very smart, just from a storytelling perspective, that Sarah put that together because then it allowed us to explore so many different coming of age stories. But it’s also what Gretchen, it’s the truth, that’s what Gretchen would’ve done. She would’ve said, disparate people all having to come together, look how community either built or exploded.”
Streicher: “It has been a minute since I’ve been in high school, but there was not a ton of migration between cliques, and you get put in this artificially constructed environment with people that you do not rub elbows with at school. It actually gives an opportunity to see how some of those star-crossed relationships socially can actually become the most beautiful relationships. I think two of my favorite relationships on the islands are Fatin and Leah and then on the boys island, Kirin and Ivan, which is a very, very contentious relationship. Those people they do not run together. They do not run in the same social environment at school, but here they have no choice, but to encounter each other and actually work things out and find common ground.”
Was there any added pressure coming into season two, knowing that you already had such a big building fan base?
Streicher: “Yes. I felt it enormously. I mean, character creation is, it’s one of our most challenging arts in this medium. I got to spend years developing those young women and here we were on a bit of a time crunch, but you have to invest that same love. You have to draw from your own life, draws from the lives of the male writers, the queer writers that we brought on. We knew that the onus was on us to make them come alive and have the depths that the women had. Otherwise, it would’ve felt really thin and upsetting, there was a lot of pressure there.”
Harris: “The good news when you’re a new show is you’re terrified because you don’t know if anyone’s going to come and then if they don’t, you can blame lots of other things. But when you are coming into a second season of a show where you have fans, the pressure is on. Look, I feel at every season, it’s not once, every time I feel like I better deliver, it matters even more than it did last year. But I felt a tremendous amount knowing how much our fans really connected to the stories we told, certainly adding in eight new characters that we’re asking them to invest and I felt like we have a very big job in front of us and we just never stopped loving, laboring. I never stopped being nervous and worrying about it. “
Streicher: “There’s trepidation among the fan base about these men coming in and there’s some screen time that we took to build those male characters, just so that they would be fleshed out and everyone could really sink their teeth into, but I hope that the audience realizes as the episodes continue, that we are very much even handedly caring for and loving the stories on the women’s island as well.”
Was it easy to get out of that Gretchen’s mind?
Streicher: “Well, one thing I want to say upfront is that Gretchen has a very binary perspective on the world, which is toxic, it’s off base, it’s not reality. Fortunatel,y that is one thing that we do not share. We’ve had to live in that as we’re following her experiment but should we get a third season it’s going to be on us to show how that binary perspective is not serving her and is going to hobble what she wants to do, this change she wants to make.”
Harris: “When you hire 16 people, that are willingly going to the island of Australia, but there is certainly a parallel there when you are taking 16 people to an island to be together for seven months. That certainly does feel a little Gretchen-esque on our part. I think the big difference for us is, Rachel often says it about Gretchen and I think it’s so true, Gretchen cares about humanity but doesn’t care about humans. As writers, our entire job is to get into the actual minutia of human experience, not of humanity itself. So I think that’s sort of where our big difference is.”
Is there a character, for both of you, you feel you relate the most to?
Streicher: “Well certainly, for me, it’s always been Leah, she’s why I decided to launch the series. I’ll write dialogue for Leah and the speeches will be long because she can’t quite make a point always. She’s a circuitous thinker and I’m a bit as well, so. She’s sort of where I live.”
Harris: “Obviously, as a writer, Leah has that sort of energy of overthinking things, but finding her way to sort of meaning and purpose. I’m definitely a bit of a Fatin in the sense that I kind of say it like it is. If it pisses someone off, they’ll hopefully get over it and still know I mean well by it. Then, as a producer, I think I’m pretty sturdy like Dot. At the end of the day I’m like, ‘Okay, I have all of these other feelings, but I have to kind of hold it up for everybody else.’ So I’m a bit of a combo. For me, when I look at all of these characters, and Sarah and I both say this, there’s a little bit of Ivan in me. Each of these characters, we feel something that sparks for our personal souls. It makes it really fun to write these characters.”
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Photo credit: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Amazon Studios