The pandemic might not be over yet, but you can already trace a line through the culture it has produced. The overenthusiastic “let’s put on a show!” mania of cast reunions filmed over Zoom quickly gave way to the gnawing listlessness depicted in Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside. Another part of the line, however, happened by accident.
Netflix’s Sweet Tooth is a series about a devastating global pandemic that kills millions of people and resets humanity. It was filmed last summer, in that brief golden gulp between Covid lockdowns. However, Sweet Tooth wasn’t rush-produced to reflect the situation; instead, it is based on a decade-old graphic novel and has been in development for five years.
This eerie timing might explain Sweet Tooth’s rabid popularity – it was the most-watched series on Netflix more or less worldwide upon its release, and still refuses to budge from the top 10 almost a month later – but then again, it might also have something to do with tone. For a show about the apocalypse, Sweet Tooth is absolutely brimming with optimism, centred on an innocent making his way through the world.
“At the time I was writing it, our politics were getting darker and scarier”, explains Jim Mickle, Sweet Tooth’s co-creator, over Zoom from Los Angeles. The original comic book series, written by Jeff Lemire, was a brilliant but pessimistic read, full of murder and gloom and religious zealotry. In 2016, Mickle felt that a straight adaptation would no longer hold any currency. “It would have either felt way too on the nose or a decade too late,” he says. “So we had to find something else.”
Mickle went back to the start and frontloaded the series with scenes of pure empathy. A doctor who originally had to do terrible things to find a cure for the virus is shown scrambling to hospital to save his wife from its horrors. A once-cruel man accepts a new mission with grace and dignity. And we watch as Gus – the show’s half-deer child – grows up in an environment of pure innocence, protected from the harsh realities of the world by a loving father. It is all done so deftly that, no matter how bleak things get later on, the audience has already bonded with the characters. It is a neat trick to pull off, and makes for a beautiful, redemptive watch.
“Even though it’s set in a modern, dark, apocalyptic time, it feels like a fairytale,” says Nonso Anozie, who plays a hulking character named Tommy Jeppard. “It feels like a fable or something. That’s why I wanted to act. I grew up in Camden [in London] and used to go to the Queen’s Crescent library. They used to do this club where you could go after school and they would read stories to you.” He adds with a laugh: “That was when there was free milk as well. Back in the day before Thatcher and all that.”
More than anyone, Anozie is the breakout star of Sweet Tooth, and this is also down to Mickle’s reimagining of his character. Originally Jeppard was an ageing, white ice-hockey player, duplicitous and hard to love. But Anozie – a British actor best known for small roles in series including Game of Thrones – transformed him into a figure with a much warmer heart. He is a paternal American footballer here, with another tragic backstory (Mickle says he was inspired by the peerless documentary series Last Chance U).
Produced by Robert Downey Jr and his wife Susan under the Team Downey banner, the series was originally developed for Hulu. Things were looking good – a pilot was shot, edited and delivered – and then the streamer mysteriously pulled out. “To be honest,” shrugs Mickle, “we don’t really know what happened. There were a lot of people coming in and out.”
But the Downeys weren’t easily dissuaded. Along with Warner Bros, Mickle credits them with pushing the project forward. “They rolled up their sleeves and were like, ‘We’re not letting this not get made,’ which is pretty amazing.”
After Netflix picked up the series – and, seriously, how hard must Hulu be kicking itself? – Beth Schwartz joined Mickle as co-showrunner. But much time had passed since the pilot, and the cast were now a year older. While that wasn’t such a big deal for the adult actors, for Christian Convery, who plays Gus, the fear was that he may have hit puberty.
“We were definitely terrified going into episode two,” admits Mickle. “Like, oh my God, what if he shows up and he’s a man? We had contingency plans for it. Do we reshoot his final scenes from episode one so that the progression is slowed? Plus, this was around when The Irishman came out, so we looked into weird digital manipulation.” “We jokingly talked about it,” adds Schwartz. “Maybe deer boys age faster than regular human boys?” Thankfully for them, Convery had not rapidly aged over lockdown. “We all took a deep sigh of relief,” says Mickle.
The sense of excitement towards the series is palpable in everyone I speak to. This weird little show about animal babies that they laboured on during Covid is a hit, and you sense that this is still sinking in. “I’ve done some great projects,” says Anozie, sitting beneath a framed photo of himself as Othello. “I came out of drama school in 2002 and I made some pretty big splashes on the stage very early. But this is the first role [that is] comparable to what I was able to achieve on stage.”
“I’ve been blown away by the response, and how much people seem to appreciate it in the context of Covid,” says Mickle. “It was a big wild card. Is it going to turn people off, or [would they] feel like it’s too soon?”
Although a second series hasn’t been announced yet, I am certain it must be a done deal. There is certainly much more of the story to tell; season one roughly covers the first five issues of the source material, but, in total, Lemire wrote 40. And, even though the pandemic might not have brought us much cheer, Sweet Tooth will surely continue to. “It seems to bring joy to people, which was our goal,” says Schwartz. “The reactions have been so satisfying. It makes people happy, which is really rewarding.”
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