Sweet Tooth hits Netflix this weekend. and producers are worried fans will tune out when the series starts with a pandemic.
However, what fans should keep in mind is that the Netflix series starts with a pandemic, but that is just the setup for the actual story and is not the focus of the series.
Sweet Tooth is about a group of children who are born as hybrids of humans and animals, with no logical explanation. When some people link these births with the pandemic, they hunt down and kill the hybrid children, believing their arrival caused the downfall of society.
Sweet Tooth on Netflix producers worried about reaction
The Sweet Tooth pandemic launching the storyline has nothing to do with the recent coronavirus pandemic that rocked the world.
Sweet Tooth originated as a 2013 DC Comics series by Jeff Lemire. The comic book series takes place in a world ravaged by a pandemic, reducing the world to small societies and factions.
The Sweet Tooth pilot arrived in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic started.
“It was always the plan (to begin the show that way) because we shot that in 2019, so the pilot was all done well before COVID,” series showrunner Jim Mickle told ComicBook.com.
“”I think there’s always that concern that people might skip the tiny little piece of the show and miss everything that comes after, because really that’s just the diving board to launch into much richer show about many other things. So, hopefully they don’t,” he added.
This hurt other recent shows, including the Stephen King adaptation The Stand on CBS All Access and Amazon Prime’s Utopia.
Those shows, much like Sweet Tooth, had a life that started long before the coronavirus pandemic. Stephen King wrote The Stand in 1978, and Utopia was a remake of a British TV series from 2013.
Mickle said that fans shouldn’t worry about Sweet Tooth using the pandemic as a straight horror story.
“I think we always wanted to look at it as, this could easily be a horror movie. We tried to do it with a way that had a little bit more of a fairytale feel, even before COVID,” Mickle said. “So yeah, if anything, COVID just allowed us to just shorthand a little bit more and not do as much exposition.”
What is Sweet Tooth about?
Sweet Tooth follows a young boy named Gus, who is a human-deer hybrid. His father has died, and he is running from people who want his kind dead.
Along the way, he meets new allies and friends, and realizes that while he can’t trust everyone, there is a place in the world for people like him.
Sweet Tooth hits Netflix on Friday, June 4.