Critics: Sweet Tooth season 2 is solid, oddly paced, The Last of Us for kids

Today, Netflix dropped the second season of Sweet Tooth, the post-apocalyptic fantasy series based on the comic by Jeff Lemire. The first season came out in 2021 and received more or less universal acclaim. Can the second season match it?

Sweet Tooth is set after a pandemic has wiped out a good chunk of the human population. Around the same time as the sickness began to spread, human-animal hybrid creatures began to appear. Our hero is Gus, a human-deer hybrid who sets out from his rural home in search of his mother. At the beginning of the second season, he and several other hybrids have been captured by a group of fascists hoping to dissect them and find answers about the plague.

The first season of the show distinguished itself by being both brutal and hopeful, with the bleakness of the world offset by Gus’ innocence. The second season continues in this vein, although whether it’s successful depends on who you ask.

Some critics think Sweet Tooth season 2 is better than season 1

Let’s start with some positive reviews, like the one over at JoBlo: “The second season of Sweet Tooth improves upon the first by expanding the characters we have met, allowing them to interact with new counterparts and locations and still keeping the adventure, intensity, and originality on display,” they write. “Sweet Tooth‘s second season is a wonderful tale that grows as the child actors do and earns a spot alongside series like Harry Potter that captures adolescence in a way that we rarely see done well on screen.”

The Guardian agrees that the second season hits the right balance: “The miracle Sweet Tooth performs is in keeping everyone happy. It’s a brutal post-apocalyptic drama that successfully harnesses the cute innocence of children, but is also a fantasy series grounded in the harshest of truths about what adults can do when times are tough, so it never falls into the trap of making the viewer feel as if nothing is real and nothing really matters.”

Finally, The National pointed to the compelling plot: “The strength of the plot is definitely the story, the ongoing mystery of what caused the Sick and how role the hybrids link to it. This was a little messy in the first season but is very cleverly revealed in season two, in a way that feels authentic to the world-building.”

A lot of critics compared Sweet Tooth to The Last of Us

In the first season of Sweet Tooth, Gus travels the post-apocalyptic United States with a protector: a middle-aged guy named Tommy who at first doesn’t want anything to do with Gus but comes to be a sort of surrogate family member. That reminded a lot of people of the dynamic between Joel and Ellie in the HBO show The Last of Us, and they were happy to say so.

“The success of recent HBO blockbuster The Last of Us confirmed Covid hasn’t put audiences off fictional pandemics,” writes The Telegraph. “Of course, Sweet Tooth had already demonstrated that point when it was a medium-sized hit for Netflix two years ago. Series two may be darker, as already pointed out. But it’s brisk and big-hearted, too.”

Yahoo Entertainment calls Sweet Tooth “Netflix’s gentler The Last of Us,” and wrote that it, “remains quite welcoming, the kind of thing you might watch with your adolescent (provided you’re up for talking a little global pandemic and eugenics).”

"The series has a big heart, but it only occasionally veers into mawkish terrain. It’s a worthy contribution to to the Hero’s Journey myth, with artfully crisscrossing storylines and moral ambivalence that deepen the longer you watch."

The Independent called the show “a more childlike version of The Last of Us,” but wasn’t quite as high on it as others. “The subject matter feels too heavy for such whimsical redirection and Gus’s twitching antlers seem like parentheses around the big themes he represents. If you’re going to draw so heavily on what James Joyce called ‘the nightmare of history’ then please give us thoughtful adult horror, like The Road or Son of Saul, not this Disney-fied dystopia.”

Sweet Tooth season 2 feels stretched and oddly paced

And indeed, there were a number of critics who were underwhelmed by Sweet Tooth’s sophomore outing, like We Got This Covered: “It might only be eight episodes long, but it would have been exponentially better to tell this particular story in six, or dive deeper into something other than the obvious. Sweet Tooth season 2 is good, but it’s not great, which has to be deemed a disappointment given the expectations placed upon it by its phenomenal forebear.”

Collider also felt like something was off with the pacing: “Sweet Tooth Season 2 largely seems like it’s using its time to get the pieces in the right place for a theoretical third season. In many ways, Season 2 still follows much of the path that Lemire’s graphic novel series did, but without the danger or building tension. Sweet Tooth still struggles with the tone of the series, as if it wants to both be a cute story with adorable kids dressed as animals, but with a very real sense of peril that anyone could very well be murdered out of hatred at any time.”

And Fortress of Solitude can bring us home with a similar complaint: “Unlike the first season, Sweet Tooth Season 2 drags for large sections and becomes tedious in places. There are episodes that could have been condensed into scenes, and it does feel as if the content is being stretched out to get a longer story than needs to be told here. Yes, it’s clear the creators are trying to convey how terrible the hybrids are treated and it’s extremely sad, but it gets to the stage where it’s almost depressing to start the next episode.”

Even these critics have nice things to say about the show, so it’s not like the second season is being panned. Issues aside, it sounds worth checking out if you’re in the mood for a fantasy journey.

Both seasons of Sweet Tooth are streaming now on Netflix.

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