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.
Co-created by Glover and Janine Nabers, a veteran of Glover’s widely acclaimed Atlanta, Swarm attempts many things over seven half-hour episodes – elevated horror, stripper heist movie, a spoof of true crime documentaries, a riff on blithely sinister “maximizing potential” cults, among others. But it is primarily and provocatively a bloody satire of fandom and the extreme devotion leveled at pop stars. Dre’s predominant character trait – often, to the show’s detriment, her only trait – is an unflinching loyalty to Ni’Jah wielded as license to literally destroy anyone who doesn’t subscribe to her rule. “Who’s your favorite artist?” she asks repeatedly, menacingly, as the kills pile up in a blunt exaggeration of fandom more in line with the violent obsessive of Eminem’s Stan, the song that inspired the term, than with a real online devotee.
Passionate, even virulent fandom is a fruitful premise for a TV show. It’s remarkable that we don’t have more material grappling with it, given that fandom is one of the most fundamental forces in entertainment and popular culture. Taylor Swift stans may be the only force strong enough to trust-bust Ticketmaster; Nicki Minaj’s notoriously ruthless fandom, the Barbz, was the social media training ground for stan turned viral hit turned pre-eminent pop troll Lil Nas X. It can be convincingly argued, as internet reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany does in her book on One Direction fans, that fandom has shaped the internet as we know it – its vernacular, its ardent in-grouping, its impassioned dynamics. The techniques of fan accounts – dog-piling, amplifying, riffing, hyperbolizing – buoy both its ingenuity and its fury.
And yet, for all the fandom that some shows court (I, for one, am deep in the Succession memes, updates and “no context” screenshots), this force has mostly bypassed direct depiction, only occasionally wafting on screen. Characters may have passionate celebrity crushes as a jumping-off point (Elle Fanning’s obsession with Glee in true-ish story The Girl from Plainville, the DeuxMoi-esque fascinations of those in the new Gossip Girl) but I cannot think of another TV show which takes fandom as its central premise or curiosity. (Not that Swarm is particularly curious; the show’s instrument of critique is, like Dre’s preferred method of bludgeoning, blunt, heavy and unwieldy.) In its woozy surrealism (an Atlanta signature), mid-2010s timeframe and incorporation of tweets, Swarm feels most akin to the 2021 film Zola, which attempted to capture the verve of a viral 2015 Twitter thread about a stripping gig gone awry and fizzled on impact – yet another example of the difficulty of translating the internet, and particularly the hyper-kinetic experience of social media, to a different medium.
As someone very much not into horror but invested in pop stars, I watched Swarm on these grounds: there’s so much to say about fandom, parasocial overidentification, the way devotion plays out online and shapes the mind off it. What would a show overtly invoking the Beyhive have to say about it? Swarm treads in interesting, dicey territory and has something to show for it. The show, unlike most others, has a specific timeline, befitting the timestamped, micro-era delineated experience of being online. Swarm takes place between April 2016 and June 2018 – a period which directly aligns with a particularly ardent time for the Beyhive, with the release of Lemonade, the birth of her twins, the bizarre “who bit Beyoncé” incident and the triumph of Beychella, all of which have near-direct parallels in the show.
There are clever cameos (Paris Jackson as a white stripper who insists she’s black, Billie Eilish as an unnervingly charismatic cult leader) and effective satire – a late-series imitation of a true crime investigation is particularly biting. The episodes are never less than intriguing to look at. But Swarm doesn’t have much of anything to say about fandom itself. The point, sledgehammered home again and again, doesn’t seem to get beyond the fact that fandom dynamics exist and are powerful, and that sometimes that’s toxic. It imagines, in lush, artful shots on 16mm film, that if you literalized the cutthroat stan wars and gave “I got the receipts” a weapon and a room, the results would be bloody – neither a novel nor compelling insight.
The limpness is in large part because the character of Dre, despite Fishback’s uncanny, searching performance, never comes off as a real person. She is alternately pitiful, awkward, deranged, cunning, sociopathic or, in a finale that attempts a heel turn and splats, all of the above. But beyond fealty to Ni’Jah, she’s never a consistent character, more a blunt weapon of exaggeration and plot, with broad strokes of trauma (the loss of her best friend) and mental illness. Glover, who directed just the pilot (Nabers has writing credits on half the episodes) as much as said so himself; in an interview with Vulture he described Dre as not “layered” and said he advised Fishback to think of the performance “more like an animal and less like a person”.
Which is a shame, because fandom as a phenomenon and experience, on both the collective and personal level, is far more complex, contradictory, weird and interesting than that. Devotion can be primal, even destructive; it can also be cheeky, or communal, or creepy. There’s a show to be made about the way chasmic feelings for a person you don’t know is at once normal and totally bizarre – how it can be psychotic and brain-wormy, how it can enliven and bond, how it be both delusional and more real than anything. Swarm is a daring show, bold and odd, but it balks at that challenge.
