![]() The series’ chief concern is Ni’Jah and her toxic superfans, with Beyoncé and her Beyhive surely the subject of the cheeky caption that opens each instalment: “This is not a work of fiction. As Fishback maintains a blank malevolence, Swarm becomes as listless and cold as she is. She is driven by grief, by obsession, by her inability to function in society and to some extent by her experience of misogyny, but the show never gets around to saying anything deep about any of those. The problem is with Dre herself, who never develops as an antihero: we neither cheer her on as she kills, nor feel particularly repulsed. It would be good to spend more time with the strippers or the middle-class hippies. She returns to Houston on a revenge mission in an episode co-written by Malia Ann, Barack Obama’s daughter.Ītlanta used to love a diversion, setting up a new character, bouncing the protagonist off them in an illuminating way and then dispensing of them again within an artfully elliptical half hour. She accidentally moves into a commune full of apparently benign white women in touch with their spiritual side. She works in a strip club, bonding uneasily with her fellow dancers and initially frightening off punters with her clunking gait and insistence on dancing to sad Ni’Jah ballads. But Swarm is not a straight drama, it’s a serial-killer satire: we can cope with some crude characterisation while we wait for the blood to start spurting and, when Marissa’s relationship with her creepy boyfriend (Damson Idris) ends tragically, we have our inciting incident and a monster is born.įrom there Swarm almost becomes an anthology, as Dre pops up in different parts of the US, usually with a new identity because she’s fled the carnage, or sometimes just the deep humiliation, of the previous episode. Photograph: Courtesy of Prime Videoĭre is a slightly patronising cartoon of a lonely outcast, her naivety and awkwardness constantly pushed to the max as she glowers stroppily at everyone. She gets a new credit card to buy front-row Ni’Jah tickets she is nowhere near being able to afford, and is devastated when Marissa – who used to be as keen a member of the Swarm, the Ni’jah fan collective, as Dre still is – does not want to accompany her to the gig because she is well into her 20s now and has moved on.īuzz kill … Swarm. Clumsy, resentful, walking with a flat-footed shuffle and often nearly mute, Dre is fearful of alcohol, drugs and sex, replacing all those vices with an all-consuming love for her fave singer. She is a nobody, living in a drab apartment with her much more capable and confident sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey), working in a sales job that doesn’t suit her in the local mall and spending all her time thinking and posting online about Ni’Jah, a singer clearly styled to resemble Beyoncé. If that doesn’t make it a must-watch, or at least a must-try, Glover’s parallel career as the rapper Childish Gambino increases the intrigue: Swarm is about the dark side of music fandom, and if anyone can turn that into art, you would think Glover can.ĭominique Fishback is Dre, whom we first meet in Houston in 2016. S warm is the first fruit of Amazon Prime Video’s production deal with Donald Glover, creator and star of the modern classic Atlanta.
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