Swarm prime video

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) • Flipboard • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) • Click to copy URL • Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Swarm’ On Prime Video, Where A Singer’s Superfan Goes On A Killing Spree • Sometimes there are shows that hinge on one performance, namely the lead. It could be the way the show is structured, or just because it concentrates so heavily on a single character. A new Opening Shot:“This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.”“Houston Texas, April 2016.” We hear buzzing sounds. A clock counts down from 10 seconds to zero. A woman wakes up in front of a poster of a singer named Ni’Jah (Nirine S. Brown). The Gist: Dre (Dominique Fishback) is one of Ni’Jah’s biggest fans, and she and her sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey) have been following her since they were kids. Dre still tweets as “The Swarm”, representing the group of the singer’s most ardent fans. Dre gets up, finds the new Discover card she recently got, and hops online to get tickets to Ni’Jah’s latest tour; the only seats left are $1800, and even though Dre couldn’t afford them in a million years, she gets them anyway. Then she peers into her sister’s room and sees her getting it from behind from her boyfriend Khalid (Nirine S. Brown), who sees Dre watching and smiles. He knows that Dre is a virgin an...

The SXSW logline for Swarm reads: “Murder. Sex. Music.” The series has been described as revolving around a Beyoncé-like figure. Glover recently described the series as a “post-truth Piano Teachermixed with The King of Comedy” when revealing a first look to Mad Men’s Don Draper and The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano, to create an antihero “through the lens of a Black, modern-day woman” with Dre. The series also stars actress and Chloe x Halle singer Chloe Bailey as Dre’s sister, Marissa, and Snowfall star Damson Idris as Dre’s boyfriend. Malia Obama is among the writers in the room, as Swarm Courtesy of Warrick Page/Prime Video Nabers ( Watchmen, Away) serves as showrunner for the series and Glover directed the pilot.Stephen Glover, Fam Udeorji, Steven Prinz and Michael Schaefer are executive producers, with Fishback as a producer. Swarm marks Glover’s first project under his Amazon overall deal. multihyphenate exited his pact with Disney-owned FX for a multiple-year, eight-figure overall deal with the streamer.

S warm is the first fruit of Amazon Prime Video’s production deal with Dominique Fishback is Dre, whom we first meet in Houston in 2016. She is a nobody, living in a drab apartment with her much more capable and confident sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey), working in a sales job that doesn’t suit her in the local mall and spending all her time thinking and posting online about Ni’Jah, a singer clearly styled to resemble Beyoncé. Clumsy, resentful, walking with a flat-footed shuffle and often nearly mute, Dre is fearful of alcohol, drugs and sex, replacing all those vices with an all-consuming love for her fave singer. She gets a new credit card to buy front-row Ni’Jah tickets she is nowhere near being able to afford, and is devastated when Marissa – who used to be as keen a member of the Swarm, the Ni’jah fan collective, as Dre still is – does not want to accompany her to the gig because she is well into her 20s now and has moved on. Buzz kill … Swarm. Photograph: Courtesy of Prime Video Dre is a slightly patronising cartoon of a lonely outcast, her naivety and awkwardness constantly pushed to the max as she glowers stroppily at everyone. But Swarm is not a straight drama, it’s a serial-killer satire: we can cope with some crude characterisation while we wait for the blood to start spurting and, when Marissa’s relationship with her creepy boyfriend (Damson Idris) ends tragically, we have our inciting incident and a monster is born. From there Swarm almost becomes an anthology,...

Swarm’s fourth episode and midway point, “Running Scared,” finally builds out how Dre (Dominique Fishback) sees herself, especially in relation to other women, but too quickly abandons its sly look at how these bonds can be warped and weaponized. Photo: Prime Video Spoilers follow for the Prime Video limited series , all seven episodes of which premiered Friday, March 17. In Swarm, the sound of buzzing bees is a portent of violence. As the limited series follows Dre (Dominique Fishback) on a killing spree in honor of her dead best friend Marissa and their favorite artist, pop star Ni’Jah, an insect drone enters the sound mix — a nod to the show’s barely veiled references to Beyoncé and her committed fans, the Beyhive — cueing Dre’s internal shift into simmering frenzy. When Marissa’s family kicks Dre out of her funeral, when Dre attacks a man who mocked Marissa online, when Dre approaches Ni’Jah and bites into her flesh: buzz buzz. But the aural anxiety of Swarm also signals Dre’s desire to be seen and heard, to connect with someone as she once did with Marissa. As Swarm moves Dre around the country, it pokes and prods at what obsession and loyalty do to an individual, positioning those guiding forces as distorted reflections of the same desire for closeness. It’s why Swarm’s fourth episode and midway point, “Running Scared,” is simultaneously so intriguing and frustrating: It finally builds out how Dre sees herself, especially in relation to other women, but too quickly ...

At times, you can see how Swarm is tapping into a number of interesting ideas and attempting to weave them into a critical text meant to be read closely. But the show’s so committed to lampooning one real-world idol and her legion of stans that Swarm ends up feeling fixated on punching down rather than actually saying something insightful about how people can end up finding community in the most toxic digital spaces. Swarm tells the tale of a young woman named Andrea “Dre” Greene (Dominique Fishback), who, like countless other people in the world, thinks of multiplatinum recording artist Ni’Jah (Nirine S. Brown) as the second coming or the closest thing to it. For Dre and her sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey), Ni’Jah isn’t just a singer and dancer whose performances sell out stadiums across the world — she’s a wellspring of the art that helped shape their identities as young girls when they first discovered her music. But after years of being able to bond over their shared love of Ni’Jah’s music and a Twitter fan page dedicated to their favorite singer, Swarm opens at a time in the sisters’ lives when it’s clear that their closeness hasn’t exactly been healthy for either of them. As the more well-adjusted sister, Marissa knows in her heart of hearts that some distance might do her and Dre a little good. But when Marissa’s decision to pull away becomes somewhat more long-term, Dre begins to spiral in a way that makes good on the many heavy-handed hints Swarm drops to the realit...

But Swarm, which premieres as a full seven-episode season on Prime on Friday, doesn’t entirely stitch the two together, too committed to its goal of depicting a scandalous faction of fandom while making a light mockery of the world around it to really come away with much of a point—or even an engaging question. The first half of the show follows a sort of wash-rinse-repeat format, charting the depths of Dre’s mental devolution as she, a fan who is disgusted by others’ lack of Ni’Jah appreciation and interest, travels across the country, leaving a trail of violent dissatisfaction with a seemingly tasteless world behind her. This is interesting, and it would be a good start to a fictionalized commentary on fandom if it weren’t so muddled. Dre’s motives are a melting pot. She is in a deep state of grief and is, before her road trip, depicted as likely neurodivergent and (as we are soon to find out) severely mentally ill. Her identity as a fan is wrapped up in this, of course, but it is not the only factor—and arguably, at the start, not even the driving factor—in her full descent into madness. What are we supposed to take away from Swarm’s first few bloody episodes, beyond the idea that stan culture can be toxic for all involved parties? And how do we actually engage with whatever Swarm is trying to say about fandom, when we can’t necessarily assert that it is mostly Dre’s devotion to her idol that causes her to act on her violent urges? This isn’t to say that the show can’t,...

Dominique Fishback stars in the Beyoncé-inspired thriller series Swarm. Warrick Page/Prime Video Many spoilers for Season 1 of Swarm lie ahead. Once upon a time, not so long ago, an internet personality dared to publicly criticize a very famous musician with an overly zealous fanbase. Those stans descended upon the critic swiftly, hopping into their mentions and DMs to talk trash and even go so far as to post death and rape threats. The involved parties shall remain nameless here because I'm not particularly interested in dealing with these stans myself. But let's just say said artist – whose admirers are collectively named after a popular children's toy – has elicited and even encouraged this behavior many times before. It's one of the more nightmarish scenarios that can play out on the internet, an all-too-common "love" language spoken across fandoms of all kinds. Swarm, a bizarre new series created by Atlanta (which Nabers also contributed to), it expresses a discomfort with and cynical attitude toward social media and fame to sometimes frustrating results. Hive mind An excellent Dominique Fishback plays Dre, a socially inept retail worker with just two interests in life: Her sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey), an up-and-coming makeup artist, and the global pop superstar Ni'Jah (Nirine S. Brown). As kids, Dre and Marissa bonded over their shared love for Ni'Jah, but now that they're both young adults rooming together and with bills to pay, Dre's fandom remains in arrested de...

Swarm Amazon Studios Nabers liked the idea of showing a softer side to Khalid’s macho exterior within his home: “We added a dog, a Rottweiler, for that particular scene, [to] set the tone. We’re setting Khalid up as this guy who is a bully, he’s cocky, he’s the type of guy that probably walks around the neighborhood with a shirt off, letting his Rottweiler bark at people. But he’s this kid that actually lives in a proper, very homey house.” Swarm Amazon Studios Dre’s choice of murder weapon went through many iterations before the shooting of the scene. “It was a pan, and then I think it was a billiard ball, which didn’t make sense, because we wanted something that she could bludgeon [with]. At one point, it might have been a hammer,” Nabers explains. “Then we were sitting in this production meeting, and Drew [Daniels, director of photography] was the one who very brilliantly thought of the salt rock. As soon as he said it, [I was] like, ‘Oh, that’s it. That’s absolutely it.’“ Swarm Amazon Studios “It was actually really easy to write this scene because it felt like a lot of callbacks to what we already had established between [Dre and Khalid],” Nabers muses. “Like cursing, or saying, ‘I don’t drink,’ and him having offered her beer before, earlier on in the episode. Just feeling like this man has never seen who this woman is.” Swarm Amazon Studios “This final scene is very full-circle, in terms of her relationship with Khalid, and how it leads to this moment that you think...

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) • Flipboard • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) • Click to copy URL • ‘Swarm’ Season Finale Ending Explained: Did Dre Really Meet Ni’Jah? • While the premise of Prime Video’s In episodes one through five of Swarm, a young woman named Dre (Dominique Fishback) has an obsession with a Beyoncé-like R&B singer named Ni’Jah. Dre’s foster sister, Marissa (Chloe Bailey), shared her obsession when they were younger, but when Ni’Jah drops a surprise album in April 2016, Marissa kills herself on the night it comes out (an event inspired by a Lemonade), and that’s the catalyst for Dre to go on a killing spree, seeking out anyone who dares talk trash about her favorite pop star. Swarm Season Finale Ending, Explained In the first five episodes of Swarm, Dre’s story is that of a woman on a downward spiral, working her way toward becoming a prolific serial killer. While Dre initially appeared to be emotionally stunted and irrationally attached to both Ni’Jah and Marissa, her mental stability all but disappeared after Marissa’s death, which is when her killings begin, starting with Marissa’s boyfriend Khalid (Damson Idris), whom she bludgeons to death. The killings continue, but in Episode 6, the sequence of events is interrupted when the episode called “Fallin’ Through The Cracks” depicts a very meta true-crime docume...

But Swarm, which premieres as a full seven-episode season on Prime on Friday, doesn’t entirely stitch the two together, too committed to its goal of depicting a scandalous faction of fandom while making a light mockery of the world around it to really come away with much of a point—or even an engaging question. The first half of the show follows a sort of wash-rinse-repeat format, charting the depths of Dre’s mental devolution as she, a fan who is disgusted by others’ lack of Ni’Jah appreciation and interest, travels across the country, leaving a trail of violent dissatisfaction with a seemingly tasteless world behind her. This is interesting, and it would be a good start to a fictionalized commentary on fandom if it weren’t so muddled. Dre’s motives are a melting pot. She is in a deep state of grief and is, before her road trip, depicted as likely neurodivergent and (as we are soon to find out) severely mentally ill. Her identity as a fan is wrapped up in this, of course, but it is not the only factor—and arguably, at the start, not even the driving factor—in her full descent into madness. What are we supposed to take away from Swarm’s first few bloody episodes, beyond the idea that stan culture can be toxic for all involved parties? And how do we actually engage with whatever Swarm is trying to say about fandom, when we can’t necessarily assert that it is mostly Dre’s devotion to her idol that causes her to act on her violent urges? This isn’t to say that the show can’t,...