CHENNAI: Amazon Prime’s yawn-inducingly long 10-episode “Panic” based on a young adult novel by Lauren Oliver, who doubles up as the series writer begins on a dramatic note with teenager Heather Nill (Olivia Welch) jumping off a cliff into gurgling waters to score points in a game aptly titled Panic. She is desperate to win the $50,000 prize money, but this death-defying
Author Lauren Oliver adapts her own YA novel Panic for a 10-episode Amazon series, which has teenagers competing in deadly dares built around their deepest fears, in hopes of winning a cash prize. The teens’ story arc is compelling, but to widen the show, Oliver added a police-procedural subplot and many adult characters, which dilute the danger, romance, and action. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.
The stakes for the characters in Panic are sky high â literally life and death, as in a second episode challenge where contestants traverse a rickety steel beam between two grain towers stories above a crowd of their peers. But Panicâs 45-minute episodes, also written by Oliver, barely lift above a dramatic flatline. The series leans heavily on teen adrenaline but offers frustratingly few clues as to why itâs applied to Panic, whoâs coercing them, or why no one simply spills the beans. High-schoolers gather each summer to watch their friends skirt death by inches for ⦠what, exactly? Itâs a zombie of a series â all the parts of a dystopian-adjacent, horny teen YA thriller without a heartbeat of central mystery.
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Panic. Named after an annual tradition in which the recent high-school grads of a small Texas town compete in a risky game that resulted in the deaths of two players the previous year, the series finally lets us feel the weight of the decision to participate in the summer-long tournament at the end of the fourth episode.
“We’re both trash,” declares bad boy Ray (Ray Nicholson) to good girl Heather (Olivia Welch), citing their broken families and the dirty or pitiful looks the teens get around town. “I don’t think good things are going to happen to me anymore,” he sighs not as long as he stays in Cary. The Panic game yields a winner-take-all cash prize of just $50,000 not enough for the rich, college-bound kids to gamble on their very lives by, say, playing Russian Roulette or walking across a highway blindfolded, but enough to inspire dreams of moving away and
Amazon Prime continues its pattern of high-concept teen-driven shows like the incredibly effective “The Wilds” with today’s full-season drop of “Panic,” based on the 2014 book of the same name by Lauren Oliver. With a very smart premise that incorporates the dread of being a teenager into a literal life-or-death situation, there’s a wasted great idea at the center of “Panic,” and a reasonably strong young cast circling around it, trying to find something weighty to hold onto. There was a time when Oliver’s book would have made for an intense, entertaining 100-minute movie, but it strains under the pressure of a 10-episode season. Even for teenagers eager to take on the world, more isn’t always better.