Sweet Tooth

Sweet Tooth is a series worth your time and emotional energy. The creative team has lovingly rendered a fully realized world, utilizing subtle, practical visual effects, gorgeous cinematic landscapes, stellar writing and beautiful performances across the board. Together it makes for one of the best adaptations in recent memory.

The performances are strong throughout—Anozie is particularly remarkable—but it’s the consistently inventive writing and robust filmmaking that makes the project stand out. It’s heartfelt and fantastical at the same time.

In short, "Sweet Tooth" exemplifies the best of what fantasy storytelling can be, creating a whole world without ever forgetting that the most important one of all is our own.

The transition of Sweet Tooth into more of a family-friendly fable is a good look for this sprawling tale, one that thankfully is full of hope rather than destruction. Sweet Tooth does this through an endearing adventure that shows rebirth and new chances can come out of even the worst disasters — which makes this a rare uplifting pandemic story in 2021.

What’s even more impressive is the delicate balance between the laughable and the distressing here. “Sweet Tooth” has some serious and timely bite.

Fittingly switching between sweetness and bite, Sweet Tooth is a children’s fable fit for grown-ups. It’s not startlingly original but is buoyed by affecting chemistry between Christian Convery and Nonso Anozie.

Plague aftershock as entertainment seems preposterous right about now, but when transformed by the weirdo extremes of “Sweet Tooth’s” universe, the subject becomes a post-apocalyptic joyride.

There is a great deal of jeopardy along the way, but the scenes always come back to something reassuring, and there is no gore. It’s reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s 1980s output.

If you can withstand the early earnestness, the lack of subtextual consistency shouldn’t be a problem, and so much of Sweet Tooth lands exactly on its desired terms. The performances are sturdy, the action scenes thrilling and Jeff Grace’s score conveys the right notes of adventure and melodrama.

Viewers who can get past fatigue of the moment will be rewarded with a beautiful, dark fairytale about the complexities of family.

"Sweet" has far more going for it than against it, and its eight-episode season will likely be quickly devoured by fans. It may not be the next "Stranger Things," but it certainly gets closer to that formula than many other series that have tried.

Somehow whimsy, paranoia, sometimes brutal action and hard-pressed affection find a pleasing tonal balance throughout the first season’s eight episodes.

We were surprised how engaged we were with Sweet Tooth, even though it’s a show about a virus that wipes out most of humanity; it’s not something you want to contemplate as the real pandemic we’re suffering through winds to a close. But good performances and an adaptation that grounds things into some sort of reality saves the show from eye-rolling preciousness.

Narration by James Brolin tends to lean heavily on truisms that tell little worth knowing. The episodes can feel baggily paced. And for a solo adult viewer, Gus’ journey may feel a little predictable in moments. But for the right kind of kid, “Sweet Tooth” might make for good family viewing.

There’s probably a more spiritually faithful adaptation of the comic that could be interesting in our own pandemic-altered world, but it would be hard. Filtering the material through Gus’ (occasionally glowing) eyes creates just enough distance from reality to make the YA-style adventure feel like its own often thrilling thing, rather than yet another awkward reminder of the world beyond our quarantines.

The series’ efficient storytelling, world-building, and character work make it easy to switch off your brain and enjoy the adventure (that is, if you can get past The Sick). Strong performances help, too, and with so many critical core ingredients working smoothly, it’s much easier for a genial little fantasy-adventure series to go down easy.

A lot of this feels like prologue to the real story, a first chapter to a much broader, more fleshed-out tale that has all put all the pieces in place that it takes the concluding episode of this season to reach. Luckily, the charismatic cast and a sure-footed command of story beats keep it on the right side of plodding. With a winning (and occasionally brutal) approach to its darkly fantastical imaginings, Sweet Tooth find a nice balance between its sugary and bitter elements.