REVIEW: Wolf Like Me – Season One [2022]

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 6 | Runtime: 30 minutes
Release Date: January 13th, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Peacock
Creator(s): Abe Forsythe

Maybe you should help yourself.

It’s a silly premise: Boy meets werewolf. Sillier still because of a prevailing sense of fate bringing them together as if their respective baggage can only be handled by the other. From one car crash to another (with a spilled coffee in between), Gary (Josh Gad) and Mary (Isla Fisher) cannot seem to stay apart even when they try. Because they do try. Desperately. Her to make sure he doesn’t find out. Him when he inevitably does.

Created by Abe Forsythe (who writes and directs all six episodes of the first season), “Wolf Like Me” isn’t subtle in its psychological metaphors. The two main characters like to say that “no one is perfect” because the sentiments are true regardless of whether the degrees of severity are skewed. That’s not to say what Gary did after his wife died of cancer is excusable. It’s not. Forgivable, but not excusable. But it also isn’t murder under a full moon.

The show isn’t trying to pretend they’re the same, though. It also unabashedly leans into its inherent silliness. For example: Mary running off into traffic when she realizes she’s stayed out too long on a transformation day. That the scripts constantly find a balance between saying something (mostly through the dynamic these adults have with Gary’s eleven-year-old, panic-attack-prone daughter Emma, as played by Ariel Donoghue) and entertaining us is a big part of its success. Because you can do both. Not everything needs a dour pallor of nihilistic gloom.

And Gary and Mary are perfect together. They make each other happy and that in turn carries over to Emma getting out of her own anxiety-riddled way too. The rocky road towards discovering this truth is fun and funny while the finale’s cementing of the bond finally lets the horror out in full (cheesily and, seemingly, via practical effects). Wielding the supernatural to confront real familial issues of grief, survivor’s guilt, and vulnerability doesn’t make the lessons about those things any less important. If anything, they’re made more so by providing audiences a palatable entry point to the experience.

It’s great to see Gad in a role that demands more pathos than an Olaf the Snowman too. Fisher is good here, but her character is dealing with obvious visible issues while his Gary confronts the opposite. He portrays his internal struggle well as a father drowning with no idea how to rise back to the surface. Maybe love conquering all to save the day is a bit too convenient, but it isn’t without purpose or meaning. Fun and emotional catharsis don’t need to be mutually exclusive.