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Netflix’s ‘Sweet Tooth’ is an apocalyptic modern fairy tale with a beautiful heart
Every living thing on this planet shares the imperative to survive and reproduce. Plants exist to grow seeds and scatter them, animals lay eggs or give birth, and viruses mutate to infect more hosts and spread. Life is the game and those are the only rules. The rules themselves have no moral value, but what is done in pursuit of survival and reproduction can improve lives or deal irreparable harm. Sweet Tooth on Netflix is a beautiful and complicated imagining of a world where life’s rules changed overnight and humanity lost their game.
Netflix Watch Guide | Sweet Tooth
Sweet Tooth begins with narration that explains what happened: An incurable and untreatable viral pandemic wiped out most of the human population and, at the same time, all human pregnancies suddenly resulted in the births of human-animal hybrid children. The question of which came first, the virus or the hybrids, is one of the central questions of the show, but whatever the answer is, humanity got it wrong. They vilified hybrids and exterminated their own animal children, damning the surviving population to live as humanity’s final generation.
Well, not everyone got it wrong. The titular character Gus (Christian Convery), aka “Sweet Tooth,” is a deer-boy hybrid whose father fled with him to live alone in a fenced-in wood isolated from the growing apocalypse. Gus grows up knowing only what his father Pubba can teach him and the show’s narrative begins when he is 10 years old and finally able to question the rules that dictate his own survival — hiding if he sees a human and never, ever crossing the fence.
