Amazon Prime Original: Panic

Amazon has been stepping up their creative output. The latest was a foray into the Young Adult side of things with a show heavy on the tension and high stakes drama. Panic.

In Carp, Texas there are very few opportunities to expand your horizons. That's why the graduates play a game known as Panic. It involves high stakes challenges that risk your health both physically and mentally to see who can survive without panicking.

The premise is fascinating really when you take a look at it as a stand alone. A game where players risk their lives in order to secure 50K. Add in the fact they are new graduates all looking to start their lives on the right footing and you have a recipe for a successful pitch. Amazon would have been foolish not to run with a high level concept like that. It's a business and every other streamer or cable network has a series like this.

Heather Nill is the main character of this story and her reason for playing panic is a last minute decision after her mother steals her savings to pay for her transmission. It immediately makes Heather and her situation easy to understand. Her motives weren't to maliciously make her friends doubt her but it's the easier way for her to earn back the money. Her friends challenge this view switch and it creates the first bit of tension. Heather not only joins the challenge but she takes home the bonus points for a daring jump from a cliff side known as Devils Drop.

It is heavy on the teen drama and the framing of relationships that make zero sense. It's typical young drama stuff where the mysterious boys split the two best friends apart in various ways. It's not well planned or executed and really slows the show down in a lot of ways. It creates a very shift in tone from the moments of tension and fear to this awkward scene where dialogue about the real world and life just feels off. It seems like when they try to add realism to the fold they miss the mark.

As far as likable leads go Heather is one of them. Small towns like Carp exist. I was raised in one of them and played organized sports so all of the youth knew each other. Heather is a shy girl who has two best friends and ultimately keeps to herself while her life begins to unravel around her. Her mother doesn't seem to respect her nor care to do better and it begins to affect Heather and her younger sister Lilly.

Episode by episode the stakes do grow so that aspect of the series is a delight. The one aspect I felt particularly off put by was to end almost every episode with some major cliffhanger just to summarize the events in the next episode. It squandered the tension building at times and didn't allow us to see things apart from being revealed conveniently.

The final three episodes are really well down as the tension ramps up toward the finale. The secret going on behind the scenes is well done and definitely not something that was easy to spot. Although there is one mystery at the core of the show that doesn't get resolved and it's kind of a bummer because it was one of the main reasons why a player took part in Panic to begin with.

It's far from a perfect show but it's 10 episodes are definitely bingeable in a few days and really won't leave you wishing you hadn't watched it. Parts of it are very off the beaten path as far as being logical but most of the cast keeps it entertaining and adds a level of mystery to a show that has a central premise that hooks you. The game of Panic is intriguing enough and given where the ending left us there is plenty of potential to see this continue. There is also the potential for it to end as this limited series of episodes and not continue and the story can stand alone. It's a very different premise and it's definitely well thought out just enough to keep something else coming at you.