Swarm Trailer: Fans Will Sting You In The New Series From Atlanta's Producers
"Who's your favorite artist?" Ask that question enough times, with an edge in your voice and a persistent buzzing in the background, and it's liable to take on a scary quality, as we saw last month in the first teaser trailer for "Swarm." Beyoncé has her BeyHive, but the Swarm stings harder and it won't stop stinging until someone dies.
The new series from showrunner Janine Nabers and co-creator Donald Glover is set to premiere on the opening night of the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival in Austin, Texas, next month, before making its way to a screen near you on Prime Video. Now, there's a new full-length trailer for "Swarm" here, along with a few more details about the series, which is set between 2016 and 2018 and which "follows Dre (Dominique Fishback), an obsessed fan of the world's biggest pop star who sets off on an unexpected cross-country journey," per the official press release.
After her breakout performance in "Judas and the Black Messiah," Fishback is taking the lead in "Swarm," and it looks like she's bringing some real intensity to the role of Dre. Glover, meanwhile, might know a thing or two about toxic fandom through his prequel role as Lando Calrissian in the troll-enflamed "Star Wars" franchise. He directed the "Swarm" pilot, and he serves as an executive producer for the series with his brother and "Atlanta" writing partner Stephen Glover.
Watch the new trailer for Swarm
Thanks to the internet, the days when all we had to worry about was a single crazed "number one fan" like Annie Wilkes in "Misery" are long since behind us. Fans, trolls, and countrymen can all now mobilize online, and whether intentionally or not, creative people can also weaponize their fan base to get they want, be it a 4-hour director's cut or the comparatively innocuous act of saving a beloved series from cancellation.
As I wrote a few years ago, fandom is its own 21st-century religion ... but what happens when the religion acts more like a death cult? "Swarm" looks poised to explore that question, as Dominique Fishback's antihero, Dre, gets drawn into a group of "crazy-ass fans" and becomes "a killer bee" to fill the hole in her life left by her sister skipping out on her.
The short synopsis accompanying this trailer, which utilizes a cover of the Pixies' "Fight Club" anthem "Where Is My Mind?", describes Dre as "a young woman whose obsession with a pop star takes a dark turn." The series is said to be partially inspired by Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy," which was a major influence on "Joker," a movie that positioned its own antihero as a kind of "cinematic stand-in for the Twitter mob," as our review called it.
In addition to Fishback, "Swarm" guest-stars Chlöe Bailey as Dre's sister, Marissa, and Damson Idris as Marissa's boyfriend, Khalid. The series also features Rickey Thompson, Paris Jackson, Rory Culkin, Kiersey Clemons, and Byron Bowers. Fittingly for a series called "Swarm," all episodes of this show are flying to Prime Video en masse on March 17, 2023.