In an early episode of The Society, Netflix's new YA drama about power and privilege in a socialist adultless future, a group of teens gather to play a game of Fugitive. They split into two teams, each with a specific but precise role: The enforcers are tasked with catching the fugitives, and fugitives must do whatever they can to elude detainment. Many of the town's rich kids promptly elect themselves as enforcers, with almost all of the less fortunate townies regarded as targets of capture. Before long, anarchy erupts. Fugitives are seized and enforcers revel in their sovereignty, drunk on power. The scene, just as many others are, is emblematic of the cardinal friction that undergirds the 10-episode series from showrunner Christopher Keyser: To anchor control, you've got to enforce order.

Not surprisingly, order doesn't come easy in West Ham. There are no adults. Food is in limited supply and it's unclear how long resources—like water and electricity—will last. There's no internet or TV. And contact outside the town's borders is impossible. "The world doesn't just turn upside down without a reason," class president Cassandra (Rachel Keller) theorizes. "We're not in some play within a play. Clever is not the same thing as true. There is a point to everything. There are answers." But what if there aren't?

A less-than-savvy remix on the classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies with echoes of teen pulp engines Riverdale and Degrassi, The Society is a moderately engaging YA soap. The show, which hit Netflix today, focuses on a group of high schoolers—200, to be exact—who go on a weekend trip but, when the weather proves too disastrous, are returned home the same night. Only, it's not home. They've been transported to a town that, in every way, looks like the manicured New England suburbia they grew up in—but isn't.

Speculation as to where they are, and why they've been brought to what they eventually designate as New Ham, runs the gamut. Maybe they're in Hell or The Matrix. Perhaps it's some parallel universe. Or possibly a dream. "Maybe this is some elaborate fucking game," one kid suggests, "like someone built an exact replica of our town and put it in the middle of nowhere." Sam (Sean Berdy), who is deaf and gay and has a bigger heart than most of the other characters on the show, proposes one possibly grim reality: "What if there is no why. What if it just is?"

Jason Parham writes about pop culture for WIRED.

When a group of students suggests driving to the next town over, they discover all exits out of New Ham have been blocked by dense impassable "woods that go on forever." The series plays out like a torturous game of Clue. There are signs all around yet nothing adds up. For Will (Jacques Colimon), the lone biracial kid who's lived in "six foster homes over two years," the predicament is as plain as the grass is green: "We're all orphans now." But it's Helena (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) who, early on, is the only person able to understand the true heart of their dilemma: "The only thing I know for sure is that we can control ourselves. What we do."

One of the show's smarter instincts is to not dwell on the why, and instead excavate the consequences of its supernatural occurrence. What happens when there are no adults to govern? Who gets to make the rules then? The material is prime for Keyser too, who co-created the mid-'90s Fox drama Party of Five, which also concerned itself with the toll of abandonment.

Fundamentally, the problem of The Society is this: It presents a complex theory and proposes to solve it with a less-than-complex carousel of characters.

By the third episode, New Ham begins to find order. Rules and roles are established, but cracks remain. Shared duties—like food prep for communal meals, trash pickup, and town repairs—don't rest well with those who come from privilege and have never had to work to survive. Still, as much as The Society looks to Lord of the Flies, it is not entirely preoccupied with nostalgia. It wants to be its own thing, even as it gets mired in trite platitudes. At one point, after a night of anarchy, Cassandra remarks: "If we don't do something, male testosterone is going to be the end of us." Which, sure, OK, but there's more to it than that. The show leans too heavily into flat, cookie-cutter stereotypes: the jock bros, the smug rich kid, the virgin Christian girl, the elementary #MeToo rhetoric. You can feel the series wanting to be smarter than it actually is. It's ambitious but unsuccessful in this regard. Fundamentally, the problem of The Society is this: It presents a complex theory and proposes to solve it with a less-than-complex carousel of characters.