When a 16-year-old kid with a huge heart but a short temper finally has nothing left to keep him grounded, he has an auspicious meet-cute with a girl who’s also spinning off the planet, and the pair set off on an impulsive trip down the eastern seaboard to take back a ’79 Trans-Am stolen from the boy’s father long ago. There will be blood, laughter and tears, and moments more awkward than you could possibly imagine, but it will undoubtedly be one of the finest journeys you have ever gone on with a show.
Like Cobrai Kai before it, the series premiered on YouTube Premium in early 2019 and found a new home with a more popular streaming service, moving to Amazon Prime Video in November of this year and giving it a chance to reach a much wider audience. The move should lead to a well-deserved second season for a show that is beautifully written by a team that includes creator and showrunner Shawn Simmons (Now We’re Talking), Deadpool’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and many others.
A rudimentary way to describe the show that Simmons has created would be to say that it’s like he took a tough guy character not entirely unlike Adam from Sex Education, put him into a relationship dynamic similar to the one found in Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, and then surrounded them with supporting characters that could be found in a season of FX’s Fargo. As great as all of those shows are, it’s still not an entirely fair assessment of the brilliance of Wayne and the revolving door of emotions you feel while you watch it.
The perfectly awkward pairing of Wayne (Mark McKenna, Sing Street) and Del (Ciara Bravo, A Teacher), begins over a stolen cookie fundraising scheme she uses to raise money for her future mayoral campaign and Wayne’s haphazard request for her to be his girlfriend within the first few minutes of meeting her. At the time, you know little of the characters’ backgrounds other than the tough environment of Brockton, Massachusetts they live in, but you immediately want them to connect with each other because you feel like they both fiercely need it.
Often the best sign of phenomenal acting is when someone can convey a litany of information without any dialogue. While Wayne is more adept at being the silent type, Del has absolutely no qualms about saying absolutely anything she’s feeling, so quiet moments are infrequent, but when they happen, both actors show the depth of their talent. You can help elicit an emotional response with a score or astute cinematography, but it really falls on the actors in the scene to get the viewer all the way there. Each episode pulls these raw moments out of the cast, and the result is a seamless transition from heartbreak to elation and an overwhelming desire to see things work out for these people you have invested in.
A tremendous credit to Wayne is that it is undeniably a comedy and will have you tearing up from laughter just as easy as it does with its weightier moments, but because the core of the show is so solid, a comedy isn’t even the first way you would describe it. That being said, the jokes and humor are plentiful, all delivered with a carefully crafted tone, and spread out amongst its principal cast – down to smaller players.
Speaking of principals, Mike O’Malley (Snowpiercer) plays Principal Cole, a man who is every bit as broken by his environment as everyone else and has a soft spot for Wayne. Along with Wayne’s friend Orlando (Joshua J. Williams, Mudbound), he sets out to find him before anyone else meaning him hard does.
Comically, it is tough to beat a sequence where the local police are interviewing students at the school in order to learn more about Wayne and his whereabouts. Those police officers are played by Stephen Kearin (Kirby Buckets) and James Earl (Scream Queens), and their dynamic is unique to say the least, with both playing against the stereotypical hard-nosed policeman you would expect to find in a tough town like Brockton.
Most people are probably so accustomed to seeing Dean Winters (30 Rock) in Allstate commercials by now that it may take them a moment to accept him as anyone else, but mere minutes into his arrival on screen, he transcends the commercials, playing Del’s father and bringing all sorts of mayhem to Wayne’s world, along with his twin sons Carl (Jon Champagne, Let It Snow) and Teddy (Jamie Champagne, Let It Snow).
Each character in the series is brought to life with some memorable distinction, no matter how small their place in the story is, and that includes consistently quippy dialogue throughout the show. When it feels like several briefly featured characters could have interesting stories developed around them, like a crude pizza parlor employee giving life lessons, then you know the world the show exists within is fully fleshed out.
The series is very music-forward to the point where you can clearly see choosing the score was a meticulous process that likely began early on with the writing, possibly knowing songs to include before anything was written on the page. A lazier production would have used Boston and Aerosmith’s greatest hits and topped it off with “Sweet Caroline” (looking at you Spenser Confidential), but with Wayne, you never know what you are going to get, and it all works. Case and point: there is a sequence where Wayne makes a grand entrance to a school dance and wins over a crowd with dance moves so absurd to the classic J-Kwon track, “Tipsy,” you can’t help but smile while covering your eyes. It’s every bit as magical as it sounds.
The laudable style of the show doesn’t stop with the music. They also use big, in-your-face graphics to keep you abreast of locations, and cleverly work the title into the openings and closings of an episode. This is often done with the character’s name being referenced in some way and the name of the episode always taken directly from dialogue. The fighting which comes as frequently as you would expect may include a conventional slow-motion spattering of blood, but it also never shies away from its brutal nature and consequences. Cinematographer, D. Gregor Hagey (Cobra Kai) also captures shots that stick with you, like when Del goes to the bottom of the pool to let all of her emotion out, reminiscent of Shailene Woodley in The Descendants.
This is a series which pays close attention to detail while still relying on the audience to connect things. Having Wayne reading a Conan the Barbarian comic while you are focused on the emotion you have just seen played out through Del alone in the bathroom, and then the way the characters look at each other (while “Changes” plays), only to have Conan come up multiple times later seemingly out of nowhere, is a trivial detail, but one that makes you appreciate its inclusion even more.
Wayne is a more than a funny road trip story with an eccentric cast of characters you can root for – but it is that. More acutely, it’s the story of a guy lacking direction, admirably fighting for good people he feels are being wronged by the world. Even though Del may seem like the last person that needs someone to stick up for her, she’s faced her share of wrongs and is worth fighting for. Both of these kids are deserving of a win, a second chance, and that sentiment heavily applies to this remarkable series.
