Amazon’s messy teen thriller Panic is an ideal summer binge

Look, let’s just get this out of the way: Amazon’s soapy teen thriller Panic is not the best show you will watch this summer.

Its story is messy and its characters are often paper-thin. (One of them is literally named Dodge Mason, and the awesomeness of his name is generally the best part of his character arc.) The premise is questionable and the internal logic almost nonexistent. This is a show where a crazy, drug-dealing farmer literally tries to murder a bunch of teens charged with breaking into his barn on a dare. It might not even, in the most technical sense, be good.

And yet, once you start watching, almost none of that matters.

Because despite all its flaws, Panic is wildly addictive TV. It’s like watching an accident unfold in front of you, as these largely interchangeable teens take on increasingly ridiculous dares in pursuit of the prize money they think has the power to drastically improve their lives. It’s ridiculous, outrageous, and, honestly, just a ton of fun.

This is precisely the kind of thing I want to watch as summer rolls in. Is it great TV? Not really. It it a blast anyway? Absolutely.

The story centers on the eponymous game called Panic, a rite of passage in which each graduating class in the small town of Carp (yes, that’s really its name) has a chance to participate in a series of increasingly dangerous challenges that require them to face their deepest fears. Get it? If you panic, you lose. Stay calm, and you make it to the finals, where you have a shot at $50K – which, in this town, is a prize to risk your life for.

Where the $50,000 prize money comes from, how the game started, who chooses the mysterious judges that run the game – these are all questions that might matter in a different show. Here, it’s all so much background noise as various dangerous activities are attempted, from leaping off the infamous cliff known as Devil’s Drop to spending a dangerous night sabotaging each other’s chances in the neighborhood haunted house.

The story primarily follows Heather, a nice but generally fearful girl who never intended to play Panic in the first place, but feels driven to compete after her irresponsible mother steals her college fund to fix her car. Heather is desperate for a way out of both Carp and poverty, and a path to a future that doesn’t look like the mess that is her home life. Whether or not risking her life in a dangerous competition where half the players are varying degrees of intoxicated at any given moment is not a question this show cares much about answering.

No, Panic knows what we want and gives it to us. There are messy love triangles, ill-advised hookups, and a police investigation, all set against the background of the game of Panic unfolding throughout the summer. From challenges that risk injury to those that wreck friendships and change relationships, there’s drama of all kinds to be had in this story.

The characters in Panic aren’t particularly deep and tend to fill certain stereotypical roles. Heather is sweet but naive, primarily driven by her desire to escape the poverty that has defined her life thus far. Her best friend Natalie is a schemer who resents Heather’s decision to play a game she assumed she’d have her support to win. Troublemaker Ray is your standard misunderstood Bad Boy type, while Bishop is a wealthy judge’s son with feelings for Heather and secrets of his own. Dodge…well, Dodge has what feels like constantly shifting motivations.

That’s actually a problem throughout the series – if you think about it too hard, none of these characters make choices that make sense and the internal logic of the show falls apart pretty quickly. (Especially when it comes to the police investigation into the previous year’s game of Panic, which killed two players – one of whom was the police chief’s son.) But, again, that doesn’t really matter so much.

The charm of Panic is its propulsive bonkers-ness, where characters do weird, often nonsensical things just because that makes for more entertaining viewing than having them not do those things would be. As the show barrels toward an increasingly implausible ending, the twists come fast and furious, at a rate that clearly hopes you won’t feel too inclined to look too closely at the reasons why any of them happen or if they actually work within the story the series has laid out.

And to be fair, you probably won’t – it’s a lot more fun to just enjoy the ride.

All ten episodes of Panic are now streaming. Have you given this show a look yet? Sound off in the comments.