Swarm Review: Donald Glover Pokes the BeyHive

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Engaging in any form of discourse around the stories Donald Glover tells often feels like stepping into an expert trap. It goes double for his latest project, Swarm, an Amazon horror comedy filled with toxic pop-music standom that will be available to stream in its entirety on March 17. Anyway, here it is.

For reasons that quickly become apparent, Beyoncé’s name is never mentioned on the show. But co-creators Glover and Janine Nabers, an Atlanta and Watchmen alum who also serves as showrunner, are trying to convey that she’s the basis for their fictional megastar, Ni’jah (Nirine S. Brown). Born in Houston, where Swarm opens, Ni’jah’s surprise release is an instant-classic visual album, headlines a major music festival, marries a famous rapper, and, in some of her most- iconic image, riding a white horse. His stans, the Swarm, use the bee emoji on social media, just like the BeyHive. The legends and rumors of their world are similar to those passed on by Beyoncé fans. Also, each episode opens with the following onscreen text: “This is not a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or events, is intended.”

In what Glover and Nabers describe as a meaningful response to the sanitized portrayals of Black women in popular entertainment—one that makes the show both compelling and, in my mind, ultimately unsuccessful—Swarm’s protagonist is not could be more different than Beyoncé. Awkward, immature, and obsessively devoted to her idol Ni’Jah, Dominique Fishback’s Dre is a young woman with the creepy demeanor of a wild child. The first thing we see him do is open an envelope containing a new credit card, activate his account, and dump the $3600 he clearly doesn’t have on a pair of Ni’jah tickets. It’s understated but also pretty sweet that he endures years of debt to surprise his beloved roommate, Marissa (Beyoncé protégée Chloe Bailey, of sister R&B duo Chloe x Halle), with premium seats on his birthday.

get together

Quantrell D. Colbert—Prime Video

Dre and Marissa grew up together, bonding over their shared love for the heroic Ni’jah as foot soldiers of the Swarm. But while Dre remains stuck in a seemingly eternal preadolescent, Marissa is growing up. She has other friends, a boyfriend (Damson Idris) Dre can’t stand, and a budding career as a makeup artist. As Marissa shows signs of drifting away from the woman she calls “number one,” Dre’s grip on reality begins to slip. At the end of the first episode, he embarks on a cross-country journey of eccentric fandom and violence that is also an unconscious search, of sorts, for belonging.

For about half of the season’s seven episodes, the creators seem to be making a simplistic horror comedy about the psychopathic undertones of stan culture. Although that term—and a social-media landscape fueling terrifying attacks by stans—is contemporary, the obsessed-fan horror trope dates back decades, to films like Misery and The Fan. That The Swarm remains reasonably engaging through its first three episodes is a credit to Fishback, also a producer, who has become one of Hollywood’s hottest young talents. He not only moves seamlessly between innocence and ferocity, characterizing Dre as pitiful or horrible or completely alien, but also captures the aspects of the character that are at war within him, without uttering a word. It was as riveting a performance as I’ve seen on TV.

Glover earned the audience’s patience, and although it took a long time to get there, Swarm eventually landed on more ambitious themes. Includes the kinds of characters familiar from Atlanta—the self-effacing “anti-racist” white woman, the defensive stooping of the bourgeois Black family—and layered guest appearances from pop royalty like Billie Eilish and Paris Jackson (Michael’s daughter), the series pokes holes. in the glib template of contemporary true crime, with predetermined heroes, villains, and pop-psychological sense-making.

Dominique Fishback on Swarm

Prime Video

The plethora of Beyoncé references seems intentionally inflammatory—if not outright malicious—at first. But Glover and Nabers, to their credit, are up to more than nihilistic stansploitation. In episodes like “Black Bieber,” “Champagne Papi,” and “Born 2 Die,” Atlanta explored how the personas of real musicians (Justin Bieber, Drake, and D’Angelo, respectively respectively) in pop culture, shaping half-conscious fantasies and nightmares and expectations that speak volumes to elemental phenomena such as race, fame, and romance. In the case of Swarm, the creators have talked about wanting to criticize what they see (and a Twitter user whose post helped spark the idea) as too much respectable media representation of Black women as glamorous, invincible saviors-slash-superheroes. No pop-star profile fits the latter description like the famously flawless Beyoncé, whose work is often cited as the apotheosis of Black womanhood.

Dre’s point, I think, is that despite being a Black woman from Houston, she represents an inversion of everything Beyoncé stands for. Which makes the character a reminder that the category of Black women is no more monolithic than the category of white men, and that it’s unhealthy to erase many Black, female experiences unlike the righteousness of “Formation” or the rapture of “Drunk. in love.” Together, Beyoncé—sorry, Ni’jah—and Dre are yin and yang: one goddess, the other monster, both halves are necessary to be whole.

How effective this allegory is depends, in part, on how much you agree that the archetypal Black woman in entertainment is a paragon of perfection. While we certainly see a lot of powerful and poised Black women on post-Shonda TV, Hollywood disproportionately still portrays Black women as violent or sexually objectified, and old stereotypes like ” Jezebel” continues. I also had a hard time getting past the specific—pat at best, narrow-minded and worst—ideas that appear in the show about sexuality, gender, and (though the creators complicate this element) the kind of upbringing that can be something has produced someone different from Dre. As a showcase for Fishback, Swarm is perfect. As cultural criticism, it can be intriguing and occasionally profound. But in its psychological underpinnings, the show combines identity with pathology in some really easy, potentially destructive ways. While this isn’t the only charge that could put Glover in the BeyHive’s crosshairs, it’s what makes me doubt it’s worth Swarm’s trouble.

Correction March 15

The original version of this story did not state Dominique Fishback’s behind-the-camera role in The Swarm. He is a producer, not an executive producer.

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