Swarm Review: A Diverting but Thinly Sketched Portrait of Stan Culture

In Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s Swarm, the ominous buzzing noise of insects signifies tension in the air. The sound, like the show’s title, refers to the volatile online fandom surrounding fictional pop star Ni’Jah (Nirine S. Brown), an overt stand-in for Beyoncé. A young black woman named Dre (Dominique Fishback) is a proud member of the “swarm,” with her fandom as fervent as it was when she and her sister, Marissa (Chloe Bailey), were teens. Now living together as adults, the pair are hardly as close as they once were. Marissa no longer shares the same obsessive devotion, instead preoccupied with more adult concerns, like finding a new job and moving in with her boyfriend, Khalid (Damson Idris).

In a season composed of seven half-hour episodes, Dre’s alienation swiftly spirals into violence—picture The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin having access to Twitter, or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer centering on a K-pop stan. Fishback plays the character in a boiling, interior mode that’s similar to a long tradition of dangerous social misfits who lash out at the world. And so much of what makes Swarm work is its willingness to let Dre be off-putting and shirk easy audience sympathy without becoming a grotesque caricature.

Though considered weird, remote, and a little clingy, Dre mostly finds ways of fitting in among her peers. Other people engage with her and let her tag along with them, sometimes to self-serving ends but not necessarily malicious ones. Her fandom feels similarly typical, coming up awkwardly, if contentiously, in conversation, but it’s otherwise not something that she goes out of her way to advertise. The certainty with which she talks about meeting and befriending Ni’Jah one day may sound a little unhinged, but it tracks with the way that people conflate art that resonates with them with the figures responsible for it.

We understand very early in Swarm that Dre’s fandom is the gate through which every other thought must pass, and that she has displaced her loneliness with obsession. She seems to bristle at the idea of people like herself having value, because it’s easier to elevate others like Ni’Jah and Marissa above herself and exist within their shadow. And Swarm continually puts Dre in situations where she’s pushed to violently defend her idol. One particular standout instance involves a cabin full of earthy white women intent on transforming Dre into her best self, even if that means missing a Ni’Jah performance.

But the series never digs as deeply into its themes or characters as it seems capable of. Ni’Jah is more of a presence that’s alluded to—just enough for the audience to clock the Beyoncé parallels and then fill in the rest themselves. While this decision keeps the series from getting lost in references and imitation, it also neglects to convey much of Dre’s feelings or her connection to Ni’Jah’s music. That the character’s emotions are accessible at all feels much more like a tribute to Fishback’s performance than any keen insight on the writing’s part.

Even the online “swarm” and Dre’s relationship to it never comes into focus, only ever appearing in brief flashes to screen-filling tweets. Beyond referring to the addresses that some fans track down and post online, Dre feels disconnected from the broader fandom. The title of the show might justifiably be labeled a misnomer, because she acts alone.

Only sporadically does Swarm explore the absurdity of transposing online interactions to the physical realm, which can perhaps be attributed to the deeply uncinematic quality of people yelling at each other over the internet. But it leaves a considerable gap in the show’s psychology, dulling the immediate and thrilling bad taste of a series drawing from such a blatant real-world analog. Though Swarm is diverting enough, it concludes with the sense that it hasn’t done much more than lightly sketch a portrait of the extremes of stan culture.