Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Panic’ On Amazon Prime Video, Where High School Grads Compete In Extreme Games For Life-Changing Money

On TV, there seems to be nothing more dangerous than bored teens living in small towns. They’re so bored, so desperate to get out, that they’ll cover their pain with sex, drugs, and partying. Or they may mount some sort of dangerous activity with a high-stakes prize. That’s the idea behind the new Amazon YA series Panic. Read on for more.

PANIC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An overhead scene of people surrounding a makeshift grave in the woods. “Every town has a secret,” says a female voice. “Ours has a game.”

The Gist: In the town of Carp, TX, members of the graduating high school class play the game of Panic during the summer before they go to college or figure out what to do with their lives. It’s a bunch of extreme challenges, some that are quite dangerous. The winner gets a life-changing amount of money that will allow them to leave this sleepy town, where it seems that people are doomed to live crappy lives if they don’t get out right after high school is over.

Heather Nill (Olivia Welch) has no plans to play the game. Two seniors actually died playing the game the previous summer, and the police are now keeping their eye on things in order to put a stop to it. We see her on graduation day with her besties, Bishop Moore (Camron Jones), who has been crushing hard on her for years, and Natalie Williams (Jessica Sula), who is planning on actually playing the game. Heather’s mother Sherri (Rachel Bay Jones) and little sister Lily (Kariana Karhu) show up at the end; Sherri asks the new graduate if she has any money.

For her part, Heather has a plan to get out: Accounting school. She’s close to the $6,000 she needs to pay for the tuition, but is dismayed when her longtime job evaporates, then is alarmed when the cash she’s saved in a shoebox for years disappears; Sherri needed it to replace the transmission in her crappy car.

Other participants in the game of Panic are Ray Hall (Ray Nicholson), who has been collecting the money for the grand prize from every student every day there was school. He’s got the pot up to a record $50,000. He’s also a giant a-hole. There’s also the mysterious Dodge Mason (Mike Faist), who moved with his mom to the town a year ago, and is determined to win the game.

After some fireworks that signal the beginning of the game — but ones shot from all over town to flummox Sheriff Jimmy Cortez (Enrique Murciano) and his deputies — the first challenge is to jump off a cliff into the water below. Everyone who takes the challenge manages to jump in without a problem; Dodge goes from a higher spot for extra points. But after Heather finds out about her mother’s theft, she goes to the meeting spot and not only jumps in, she jumps in from “Devil’s Drop,” the highest point on the cliff. She’s in the game, all right, and she has nothing to lose.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Panic feels like a combination of The Hunger Games and the “teenagers on their own” vibe of The Society.

Our Take: Panic was adapted by Lauren Oliver from her own novel; the showrunner is Adam Schroeder. On its face, the show feels like the typical YA conceit: Bored kids in a small town who use drugs and sex to help them feel anything in life. The idea is that this annual game of Panic is pretty much the only thing that the kids in this town have to look forward to. So, without the knowledge of any of their parents, and somehow still evading the authorities, these kids put their lives on the line just because life in this town is so depressing.

Sounds pretty stupid, right? But, by the end of the first episode, we were somehow sold on this concept. Much of it has to do with the performance of Welch, who plays Heather as someone who is confident her plan to break the cycle of poverty and abuse in her family and has nothing to lose once that evaporates.

As usual in shows like these, she’s the only character that’s not a teenage cliché, at least in the first episode. Everyone else fits into the niches we’ve seen on YA shows of late: The nerdy boy crushing on the main character, the confident best friend, the bully/jerk that propels the main characters into action, and the mysterious teen that people don’t know much about. The only parents around are either clueless or abusive or both.

Could the show keep those clichés going as the game plays out and the cops close in? Sure. But there was something compelling enough about Heather’s story that leads us to believe that Oliver has a desire to let these characters grow and change as the season goes on.

Sex and Skin: None, at least not yet.

Parting Shot: While listening to Heather’s voice over tell the story about the girl made of dirt who could be carried by the wind in a storm, Heather takes her leap off of Devil’s Drop.

Sleeper Star: We like Jessica Sula as Natalie, who is being set up as a someone who might turn from Heather’s bestie to her enemy simply because Heather has decided to join the game.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure how Diggins (David W. Thompson) got the job to be the emcee of this game. He basically sounds like the wiseass alumnus who got roped into his job.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s a lot about Panic that makes us roll our eyes. But we’ll give it a recommendation because we were actually rooting for its main character by the end of the first episode, and we were surprised that we were doing so. That’s a good sign for the rest of the season.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Panic On Prime Video