Wynonna Earp (Melanie Scrofano) is a mess. After witnessing the death of her big sister and her father decades ago, she’s wandered the world, getting into fights, going after bad boys, and generally sowing her wild oats. But now she’s back in the Canadian town of Purgatory, and she’s got some demons to kill. As the heir of Wyatt Earp’s Peacemaker and his curse to go with it, Wynonna is the only one who can keep the men he killed from coming back as “revenants,” demons with bad teeth and worse attitudes.
That’s more or less the pitch for Wynonna’s namesake TV series, and it’ll sound familiar to fans of a certain vampire slayer. They even have the nerdy queer girl, Wynonna’s sister Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), and the stern authority figure Agent Dolls (Shamier Anderson). Intriguing stranger with a dark past, halfway between humanity and demonkind? Check, courtesy of Tim Rozon’s Doc Holliday. We’ve even got a well-meaning but unbelieving mom. If all this sounds a bit schematic, thankfully, they also make a point to crib Buffy’s tendency to not take itself seriously.
Putting Wynonna Earp on the air is a reflection of Syfy’s campaign to take back its identity after years of Sharknado and its clones. Like most cable networks facing a baffling TV market, it experienced some pretty severe drift from its core concept in the early part of the decade. It only recently stopped being the home of WWE Smackdown, for example, and among other proposed series, was going to air Deepak Chopra having dinner with celebrities. Aside from the triumph of Battlestar Galactica, it was struggling to stay relevant, let alone reflect the genre in its name.
But in the last two years, it’s turned things around with a business model of co-producing short runs of shows with Canadian networks, and quickly turning the shows around to Netflix. What’s made it work is that Syfy’s been willing to try anything as long as it looks fun to watch. Thus you find serious bids for prestige such as 12 Monkeys and The Expanse airing next to goofiness like the straight-faced Walking Dead parody/rip-off Z Nation and bizarre alien/outbreak thriller Helix, and a return to its ’90s heyday of weird TV such as Killjoys, Dark Matter, and The Magicians.
But none of that matters if the show doesn’t work, and Wynonna Earp does, thanks not least of all to Scrofano’s dinged-up anti-heroine. Wynonna herself is far from the omnicompetent ninja that shows like this generally have. She’s a terrible shot, she has authority problems, and she’s a little too enthusiastic about bad ideas, ranging from using combat shotguns to sleeping with the wrong kind of men. She also has a believable, and funny, chemistry with just about everyone in the cast: Provost-Chalkley’s bubbly energy makes a nice contrast to Wynonna’s laconic cynicism, and Anderson’s grim and serious demeanor serves him well as a straight man.
There are a few issues here and there. The first two episodes we were sent to review have some strange pacing, perhaps a reflection of the show’s roots as a comic book. For example, Provost-Chalkley has a scene with Officer Haught (and yes, it’s pronounced how you think) that’s cute and funny, but kills the show’s momentum and has zero bearing on the actual plot. How demons are bumped off is a bit inconsistent, as supposedly they can only be sent back to Hell with the Peacemaker, but Wynonna blows them to smithereens and guns them down with pistols without seeing any of them get up. Also, there are revelations here about how their family died that you’d think our heroes would take a lot harder.
That said, it’s also got nice bits of visual humor, like Wynonna fighting an entire action scene in her pajamas and fuzzy slippers, and a little self-awareness goes a long way. Wynonna Earp just wants to be fun to watch, and in that, at least, it pulls it off handsomely.
Wynonna Earp premieres April 1 on Syfy. Until then, here’s a preview…
