Main cast: Cody Fern (Stan Vogel), Aaron Tveit (Jay Gantz), Tiffany Dupont (Addy Gantz), Blake Shields (Bob Birch), and Colin Tandberg (Jacob Gantz)
Director: Manny Coto
Wow, Aaron Tveit really is morphing slowly into Willem Dafoe. How old is he again? Dude looks super rough now. Looking at his pics from a few years back and him on the screen now… yikes. What happened? Someone get him a portrait of Dorian Gray STAT!
In this one, he plays Jay Gantz. Jay, his wife Addy, and their three-year old kid Jacob go camping at the Kern Canyon National Park, and oops, the kid disappears. Cut to later, when Jay is an alcoholic (funny how he looks as smashed as he was before he went on a bender) and stewing over the fact that many people believe that he killed his own kid back on that fateful day. One day, a hunter Bob Birch shows up at Jay’s doorstep claiming that he has some clues to Jacob’s whereabouts, and Jay drags his reluctant now-estranged wife Addy back to the woods with Bob to find their son. They meet crazy ranger Stan Vogel… and of course, worse creatures living in the woods.
Feral is dumb. I know, calling this show dumb is like saying that water is wet, but this episode plumbs new low when it comes to the meaning of “dumb”. It resembles a much longer movie about killers in the woods that has all the fun parts cut out to meet the much shorter runtime. As a result, we have the main characters spending a lot of time wandering around in the woods, with the occasional eye-rolling jump scare to keep me awake. The episode choppily staggers along in a painfully sluggish pace, with most of the action packed in the last ten minutes or so. Even then, the monsters look terrible and the cast evince no believable reaction to make me feel even a little invested in the whole thing. Seriously, the cast members all act like they are in the show only because Ryan Murphy will crush their knees and devour their pets before their eyes if they dared to walk away.
The payoff is terrible, the premise is familiar but executed poorly, and the so-called hot guys aren’t even hot. I have no idea what anyone sees in Cody Fern, as he looks like the idiot Malfoy sibling that everyone in the family bullies mercilessly, and Mr Tveit looks like he had been in and out of seven consecutive rehab sessions and none of them is helping. There are so many better Bigfoot or cannibal hillbilly shows out there, so there is no reason to subject oneself to this turd unless one really wants to experience first-hand what brain hemorrhage feels like.
