Jeff Davis, creator of MTV’s beloved Teen Wolf series from the early 2010s, isn’t done with adolescent shifters just yet. Davis has not only revived the series, which ended in 2017, for a reunion movie (aptly titled Teen Wolf: The Movie), he has also created a brand-new series about teen werewolves, Wolf Pack, both premiering tonight on Paramount+. That’s … a lot of teen wolves! Davis promises that Wolf Pack is much different than its predecessor, and in some ways, it is. And by releasing both at the same time, the streamer feels like it’s making a statement: Teen Wolf: The Movie is ending an era, making room for Wolf Pack’s new one to begin. But does today’s TV landscape have space for more teen werewolves? We’ve come a long way since 2011.
When we left Teen Wolf, a show that was popular among teens, adults, and critics alike, everything was hunky-dory in the fictional California town of Beacon Hills. Protagonist Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) had spent the entire six seasons of the show, which was very loosely based on (and much darker than) the 1985 film starring Michael J. Fox, struggling with his identity as both a teenager and a wolf, shouldering the burden of leadership as an alpha, and founding his pack on inclusivity rather than preferential treatment for wolves. By the show’s end, Scott’s “pack” included a banshee, a hellhound, a former werewolf hunter, and his best friend, a human, with other various supernatural beings coming and going.
The movie is set 15 years later, and the pack has seemingly disbanded. Stiles (Dylan O’Brien), Scott’s human best friend, was the fan-favorite character on the show. O’Brien, who received the most praise and adoration for his performance out of all the cast, is not back for the movie. That’s disappointing, but what’s worse is that Scott doesn’t mention Stiles once in the film, and we hear from Stiles’ longtime will-they-won’t-they love interest that the two have broken up—after audiences of the show waited six seasons for them to finally get together! Anyway, Scott manages to get what’s left of the band back together to solve a mystery that is once again plaguing Beacon Hills.
Teen Wolf: The Movie is so busy having the pack solve the problem ahead of them that we don’t even get to the good parts of the reunion. This is a problem: The movie incorrectly assumes that the audience remained with the original show simply for the high-speed action and hunky lupine men. That was a part of it, sure. (Some of those men were hunky.) But we mostly stayed because we loved the characters (particularly the sarcastic, human best friend Stiles) and their bond. Now, in 2023, I struggle to see where else on television stories of supernatural adolescents continue to survive, let alone thrive. (Despite that, some of Teen Wolf’s actors hope for the show’s revival.)
That’s not a good sign for Wolf Pack, either. The new series, based on Edo van Belkom’s 2000s-era YA books of the same name, starts with a humongous California wildfire (a plotline that also features, though less heavily, in Teen Wolf: The Movie—but don’t worry, like Davis said, it’s different). In the chaos of the fire, which causes a stampede of frightened forest animals into the town, two teenagers are bitten and transform into werewolves, thrusting them into the middle of multiple mysteries: Who committed the arson that caused the fire? Who is the werewolf that bit them and why? Who is the mysterious person on the phone that keeps warning them, now that they’re bitten, that someone (or something) is out to kill them? Who, exactly, is that person or thing, and why are they hell-bent on committing teenage-icide? Wolf Pack relies on mystery, and, of course, attractive young supernaturals, to keep you entertained. To grab the old(er)s, or those who binged 1990s supernatural TV during quarantine, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) guest stars as a detective. But none of it works: not without the chummy classroom scenes or the awkwardness of the goings-on in the high school halls, not without the quintessential best friend character who represents the audience: human, supportive, and entirely snarky about the world of magical beasts.
Critics only got two episodes of Wolf Pack to screen. Maybe it’ll turn a corner. But whatever it does, the very concept of the show makes Wolf Pack feel like it’s clinging to a now-bygone era of steamy adolescent supernatural romance thrillers. Shows like CW titans Supernatural (2005–2020) and The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017) are off the air, Shadowhunters (2017–2019) never really got its footing, and the show that felt like the genre’s last stand, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (the Riverdale spin-off and Sabrina the Teenage Witch remake that ran from 2018–2020), seemed to end in a whimper. As for Riverdale itself, the dying show that was once the defining example of hit teen TV with a seriously dark edge has attempted to grasp at supernatural straws as it nears its end, with very poor results. Riverdale, limping toward its seventh and final season, has long ago become a laughingstock, with people making viral content and entertaining podcasts simply by cataloging the plot’s wild twists and turns. That’s one kind of love, but it’s not the love the Teen Wolf series once enjoyed. Not to mention that the appetite for bare-chested teen werewolves on film all but withered post-Twilight.
Nowadays, we seem to prefer our TV teens to be regular humans, dealing with much realer concerns, like addiction (Euphoria), grief (Reservation Dogs), or young love (Heartstopper). When we do entertain supernatural teen dramas, they’re often made of darker stuff, with less focus on the visible ab count of the male characters and more on the brilliant minds of the female ones, as with the mega-hit Wednesday or the (now canceled) cult favorite Warrior Nun. Werewolves rarely make an appearance, and when they do, they’re far from the constantly shirtless young men that used to dominate television.
As someone who is from the hot-male-werewolf school of adolescent thirsting (I regret being #TeamJacob, but I do not regret preferring Twilight’s werewolves to its vampires), I’ve been delighted by media’s pivot toward teen shows anchored in the real world. I’m not sure that being force-fed beefed-up and unpredictably violent young men as romantic heroes was the healthiest thing for my coming-of-age, but the werewolves of yore weren’t useless. Often, these characters faced a poignant central dilemma: How do we fight to keep our humanity despite all of the things we can’t control, that we worry make us inhumane? Teen Wolf: The Movie and Wolf Pack seem to be moving past philosophy in favor of pure eye candy and action, and in a way that’s understandable: Wolves worked as a container for that question for a time, but now, we’ve seen it all before. But without that central dilemma, what’s left except bad CGI and unattainable six-packs? Not much.
