Mae Martin's Wayward exposes the dark world of 'troubled teen' schools

From Paris Hilton's 2020 documentary This Is Paris, in which she claimed she suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuse while institutionalised as a teenager, to Netflix true crime documentaries The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping and Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare – which spotlight abuse at a boarding school in New York and a so-called wilderness youth treatment centre in Utah – to the countless Reddit threads, personal blogs and social media posts in which people recount their experiences and trauma following their stints at a variety of teen institutions, to news reports and long reads from a wealth of publications, the TTI hasn't covered itself in glory.

And now Feel Good's Mae Martin has entered the chat with Wayward, a Netflix limited-series about Tall Pines Academy, a "therapeutic school", surrounded by the rolling hills and verdant valleys of Vermont, which looks every inch the safe haven for teenagers who are really going through it, from substance abuse, to grieving the loss of a sibling, to self harm.

But while the seductive promotional material promises a place where vulnerable souls can "grow and thrive" – music to the ears of parents who are emotionally unavailable, clinically depressed and therefore vulnerable to manipulation, or absent entirely – the reality is anything but.

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The institution depicted in Wayward is fictional, but Martin has drawn on their own personal experience as "wayward teen in the early 2000s", and that of her best friend, who was dispatched to a 'troubled teen' institute when she was 16.

"She was sent from Canada to an American 'troubled teen' institute, and came back with crazy stories about unregulated practices and therapy," Martin told Dazed.

"I’ve been researching it for 20 years. The germ for that industry was cults in the 1970s, like Synanon, that were doing behavioural modification. It's bizarre! It writes itself!"

As well as creating and co-writing the series, Martin also appears in front of the camera as Alex, a police officer who has moved from Detroit to the small town where the school is based, also called Tall Pines, with his pregnant partner Laura (Alias Grace's Sarah Gadon), for whom this return is a homecoming.

Laura attended the academy back when she was a 'troubled teen' and appears to have made quite the impression on Evelyn Wade (Hereditary's Toni Collette), the school's lead youth counsellor, who is thrilled to have her back.

Evelyn, played with restrained menace by Collette, doesn't look like your average antagonist. She distributes homemade baked goods and leaves food hampers on people's porches; her mode of transport is a trike, complete with a basket to hold said delicious baked goods and food hampers, and she dresses like she runs a crochet workshop.

And crucially, she has dedicated her life to helping some of society's most troubled teens work through their trauma so that they can emerge transformed and rebuild their lives. How very noble.

No, at first glance there is really nothing concerning about Evelyn.

But you only need a moment in her company to sense that something is spectacularly off – from her rejection of social cues and niceties, to a hard stare that seems to strip away every layer you’ve ever built to hide your fears and trauma, peer into the centre of your soul, and then devour what it finds, replacing it with something entirely new in her image.

After Alex comes face to face with a terrified young man who, against all odds, has escaped the academy and is begging the police not to send him back, he begins digging into what it is they really do at Tall Pines – and his findings are deeply alarming.

As the series progresses, viewers are given a front-row seat to the extreme methods Evelyn and her staff employ as students crawl through the academy’s development milestones: burrow, break, build – and finally, ascend. Here, a truly special, transformative privilege – in Evelyn’s own words – awaits a select few who may then graduate and step into the next phase of their lives.

But as we see with Laura, you can take the girl out of the academy, but you can't take the academy out of the girl. It lingers, like a virus, its spike proteins binding to its hosts for life, something she had largely managed to conceal from Alex by distancing herself from Tall Pines and Evelyn, and not revealing much about her past over the course of their relationship.

Shortly after moving back to the town, it becomes clear that Laura's pain hasn't healed, but has simply taken on a different shape, which threatens to destroy her relationship with Alex, which she describes as the one thing in her life not tainted by Evelyn, and also raises questions about what she's capable of in moments where she's not in control.

And Laura isn’t the only one trapped in Evelyn's orbit – best friends Abbie (Davey & Jonesie's Locker's Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (The Young and the Restless’s Alyvia Alyn Lind) are also being held at the school against their will, who Alex, in his capacity as a police officer and the only person in the town who appears to care about what is happening behind the walls of the academy, attempts to help.

The former was kidnapped from her bed by strangers in the middle of the night as her parents looked on, absorbing her guttural cries for help as she was taken to an unknown location and stripped of every ounce of individuality – an all-too-common fate for teens sent to these types of institutions. Regulation in this industry is often so lax it is virtually nonexistent, with programmes subject to complex laws and varying background checks for staff depending on the state.

The latter then tracks her down in a bid to break her out, only to be forcibly enrolled at Tall Pines herself, with her mother remortgaging her house to cover the fees. The troubled teen industry is estimated to pull in upwards of $50 billion a year in the US — a heartland for these programmes.

If you didn't know about the TTI coming into Wayward, or had only heard about snippets of what can happen, you might think that it all seems entirely far-fetched and completely obscene, such as being forced to complete a 50-mile hike with minimal supplies, as we see in Wayward.

Surely, you might think, this can't be legal?

But while it is heightened, with certain elements created for the purposes of the show, it's also not that heightened, as Martin told RadioTimes.com. Its victims, of which there are thousands, can attest to the authorised kidnappings and the "attack therapy", which is designed to publicly humiliate the students; they have firsthand experience of what it's like to be physically restrained, often incorrectly, which can lead to injury, and of being force-fed medication, and ordered to complete forced labour; some teenagers have attempted to take their own lives while under the school's care, or lack thereof, while others have died; and there's also the long-term psychological problems that many who attended these institutions and programmes continue to live with.

While some of these programmes may have begun with good intentions – encouraging 'troubled teens' to self-reflect and take some accountability within a structured environment that also fosters community, promoting connection with one another and with nature as they work through trauma – their methods often bring to mind the objective behind 'the crush', a harrowing practice in which baby elephants are snatched from their herds and forcibly broken for domestication: break them and reshape them, by whatever means necessary.

But what feels especially cruel – even heartbreaking – is that Wayward offers fleeting glimpses of true belonging and connection, both within the Tall Pines community and the school itself. For many townsfolk and students, these are feelings they had never truly experienced before arriving, and Martin shows us what it could be like if profit, control and ideology were taken out of the equation.

And the fact that those moments are so rare only sharpens Wayward’s indictment of the TTI, raising uncomfortable questions about what "helping troubled teens" really means – and challenging who or what a 'troubled teen' truly is.

Is adolescence a problem to be "solved", as Evelyn puts it? Or are these teens being failed by society, and by the people who sent them there in the first place?

Wayward leaves little doubt: the kids are not alright – and neither is the system that is failing them.

Wayward is available to stream on Netflix from Thursday 25th September. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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