Swarm review: New series delivers lots of death and just as many laughs

Swarm.

SCORES

Violence: 5

Blurring of line between fact and fiction: 5

Sexiness of pole dancing: 1

Greg and Zanna review a new series dealing in uncomfortable truths.

SHE SAW

Although we no longer have any babies or toddlers in our nest, this week Greg consistently referred to Swarm, Donald Glover’s new series, as “Swarmsies”. I assume he did that to cute-ify the incredibly violent and deeply disturbing show so I would stick with it. He needn’t have, I’m enjoying it all on my own like a big girl.

Glover, and collaborator Janine Nabers, created this show based on Beyonce’s crazed fandom. Episodes open with the words, “This is not a work of fiction” and “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional”. It’s quintessential Glover, who is in the business of playing with truth and fiction and toying with his audience’s trust in ways that verge on unethical.

The series follows an obsessed fan of fictionalised pop star, Ni’Jah, who goes on a killing spree following her “sister’s” suicide. She’s primarily interested in taking out Ni’Jah’s online detractors but there’s some fairly major collateral damage along the way as well. It’s extremely violent. She bludgeons people in a maniacal, splatter horror style. It’s not simply a horror comedy though because the context is so very dark.

Dre, the killer fan, is clearly mentally ill and so even as I laughed at her running someone down with her car, I couldn’t, in that moment, completely disentangle the deep sadness I had for her character - a person so unloved and so alone that her only anchor in the world is an untouchable superstar that she’s turned into her god, her religion.

Many of the events that happen in the series are based on events, or at least rumoured events, that happened to Beyonce. There’s the elevator argument that was caught on camera, the fan who allegedly bit her and many more that you can read about in articles with names like “Every Beyonce Reference in Swarm Explained” by outlets like Time Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

It’s a compact series - the total length of its seven episodes is not much more than a feature film - with Dre’s attempts to meet Ni’Jah the central plot device until a complete break from format at episode six. There are some amazing cameos from Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish but Dominique Fishback’s performance as Dre carries the series. Amid a harrowing story of desperation and probable psychosis, she pulls off some great physical comedy, including a spectacularly unsexy pole dance.

The show has been criticised by some for its treatment of fandom and tying it to mental illness but Glover couldn’t care less. He describes trying to respond to the online conversation around his work as like trying to quell the ocean. And, in Swarm, that ocean will f***ing kill you, bitch!

HE SAW

Social media is a blood sport. Dependent on conflict to drive engagement, its algorithms – their workings not even understood by their creators – fill feeds with messages that provoke outrage and drive responses that further escalate the conflict, filling yet more feeds with provocation, and so on, until the whole thing is such an ugly mess that only a psychopath could derive any value from it.

Yet we return to it again and again, not necessarily because any of this is valuable but because the feeling of righteous indignation is one of the most powerful and satisfying human emotions. Being aware of this does not mean being above it. Like most mortals, I want my fundamental goodness and rightness to be consistently affirmed by people I don’t know, and I want to be outraged by the stupidity of those who don’t share my views, and to see those clowns getting owned by my allies.

Swarm’s narrative captures all this irrational bad behaviour, turns it up to 12, and embodies it in the central, radically disturbing character of Dre, whose catchphrase, “Who’s your favourite artist?” typically precedes her horrific killings of those who have insulted Ni’Jah, her favourite pop artist, who is a lightly fictionalised version of Beyonce. I found Dre’s wild rampages horrifying but sometimes also funny, which made me think, but not too hard, in case I didn’t like what I found.

One of Donald Glover’s great strengths in his previous televisual masterwork Atlanta, was messing with our notions of reality, and he does this again here. At the end of one episode, for instance, he includes a real life interview with himself, from an old promotional appearance for Atlanta, where he talks about the fact he’s working on a new show – the one we’re watching. What is the point of this? I don’t know – I assume it’s something about fame and attention – but I do know that it made me think anew about everything I’d just seen.

Much of the reason we’re on social media is to find out who’s like us and who’s not, which is just a more time-consuming and emotionally draining version of Dre’s “Who’s your favourite artist” refrain, making her the perfect illustration and endpoint of our desperate need for acceptance. No matter how far technology advances, we will never be free of the stink of our humanity.

Swarm is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.