Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and boy, has Jenna Coleman’s Liv Taylor been scorned in Wilderness. She left her job, her friends, her family – she gave up everything, in fact – to relocate to New York for her husband’s career.

Then, just like that, she learned that Will (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) has been fucking another woman. And that, much like Shaggy before him, Will has even been caught on camera doing the dirty with his colleague Cara (Ashley Benson). So, when he announces he’s going to take her on her dream trip through the US national parks, she decides to initiate a hard pattern interrupt, acknowledge the destructive spiral she’s caught up in, and take a step to break free of it all.

Or, if you prefer, she’s going to shove him off the edge of the Grand Canyon. Tomayto, tomahto.

Watch the trailer for Wilderness below:

It’s all too easy to assume we know the villain of this piece: it’s Will, right? It’s cheating scumbag Will, who gaslights Liv into thinking she’s crazy for being annoyed about his infidelity. Who seems annoyingly unapologetic for his actions. Who lies about his affair being a one-night stand with… well, with someone whose name he can’t quite recall. Who – when Cara conveniently runs into them both in the middle of the American wilderness – wastes zero time in dropping back to keep pace with his secret lover.

Who, when Cara winds up dead, demands his wife get over her grief and heartache so that she can lie to the police and give them an alibi, damn it!

Now, I’m no Will apologist. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I loathe him with… well, if not every fibre of my being, a fair few of them. However, it’s more than a little reductive to assume that he is the only person responsible for Liv’s anguish – and no, I’m not talking about poor broken Cara, either.

Oh no, the true villain at the centre of Wilderness is, in fact, the patriarchy (who had that on their bingo cards, eh?). 

Or, more specifically, the Good Girl Conditioning Programme it forces upon women and girls everywhere.

Think about it: we are all taught, from a very young age, what little girls are made of: sugar and spice and all things nice.

As Suzanne Clisby and Julia Holdsworth explain in their book Gendering Women: Identity And Mental Wellbeing Through the Lifecourse: “[Young] girls are rewarded for certain behaviours, such as ‘being good’ and not being disruptive and that more outgoing behaviours such as speaking out and being disruptive attract censure from both peers and adults”.

It’s no wonder, then, that the word ‘nice’ has, for a very long time, been intrinsically linked with the word ‘likeable’. However, this misplaced assumption often means that women feel it’s their duty to go above and beyond to make others feel comfortable. To remain polite, courteous and accommodating, no matter what. To dress as society expects them to. To smile on demand. To laugh off inappropriate jokes. To constantly apologise, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. To let men do all the talking (to interrupt them or speak up would make us “difficult”). To, above all else, stick to the boringly inoffensive roles that society has given us.

Liv adheres to all of the above, and then some. She is a good girl when her father leaves home, refusing to speak up for herself when her mother blames her for the breakdown of her marriage. She dresses modestly, she speaks quietly, she demurs to her husband – dotes on him, even. She has good girl sex; the kind of sex that Will absolutely does not enjoy with Cara (he admits himself that he does things with his colleague that he would never dream of asking his wife to do).

Basically, Liv does everything the Good Girl Conditioning Programme demands of her, so of course she falls to pieces when she realises it was all for nothing. Her likeability did not protect her from heartbreak, her husband still cheated on her, and her marriage still cracked open like…

Well, like Will’s skull would have done had she managed to push him over the Grand Canyon as planned. Sorry, not sorry.

It’s testament to Coleman’s incredible performance, of course, that we find ourselves rooting for Liv all the way through the series – even when she’s at her most dastardly. Still, it’s also because “as women, we are taught to be so good and quiet,” explains writer Marnie Dickens, “and it’s so lovely to watch someone not having to be any of those things.”

The series is scored by Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do, the ultimate good-girl-gone-bad anthem. It reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that this is a series about a woman metaphorically killing off her old self – the ‘good girl’ she has portrayed for so many years – in order to embrace a truer and more honest identity. And, god, in many ways, Liv’s revenge arc is an inspiration: she stops acquiescing and starts setting boundaries. She allows herself to not just feel every spectrum of her emotions, but to stop burying them for the sake of others’ comfort and start expressing them, too.

Come the final episode, our anti-hero is demanding answers, putting her own damn needs first, and speaking up for womankind. Hell, when she ventures to the spot where Cara died, she’s approached by an anonymous man who warns her about the “silly girl” – and, beautifully, she tears him a new one over it.

“It would have to be her fault, wouldn’t it? Too much make-up, too flirty, too available. No walking home without a man to protect her. Of course she was asking for trouble, haven’t we always been?

“But does it ever occur to you where any of this ends? It ends with us reaching the end, the end of our tether. And where does that leave us? We become the thing to be scared of.

“We become the fucking wolves.”

Iconic. No wonder more people are cheering Liv on in her single-minded quest for vengeance than condemning her for it. We, all of us, have been pushed to the limits by societal expectations, and it feels good to live vicariously through someone who has broken free of them.

And, to all those who think Liv isn’t playing nice, we have just this to say: look what you made her do.

Wilderness is now available to stream on Prime Video.

Images: Prime Video