There’s an immediate hook to Swarm, a new horror-comedy limited series from Amazon Prime Video, which opens with a winking provocation: “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional,” reads the title card, before introducing us to a somewhat shockingly obvious stand-in for Beyoncé. It’s April 2016 and Ni’Jah, the fictional pop star adorning magazine covers, adulating tweets (“#QUEEN”) and the bedroom walls of Andrea “Dre” Greene, has announced a sold-out “Evolution” tour.
Dre, played with quicksilver, cobra-like intensity by Dominique Fishback, is a true fan. She claps back on her fan Twitter account as a card-carrying member of Ni’Jah’s stan army, the Swarm. In the opening scene, she opens two new credit cards to pay for tickets to Ni’Jah’s upcoming show in Houston, to prayers of “take my rent!” lifted near directly from the Beyhive for the 2016 Formation and 2023 Renaissance tours. “I leveled up,” trills Ni’Jah’s voice as Dre’s ringtone, a nod to her escalating mania and endless, brutal fealty to the singer over the course of the series, the first product of Donald Glover’s multi-project deal with Amazon.
