WHAT serendipity that in 2018 Hulu got interested in an adaptation of the 2009-launched limited-series American comic book Sweet Tooth by Jeff Lemire. That project did not advance, however, as we learned; but in April 2020, at the grave onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, executive producers Team Downey and production company Warner Brothers moved the thing to Netflix where it finally saw the green light.
    Serendipitous, we said, because it wasn’t as if the executive producers knew in 2018 that a pandemic was going to occur in 2019-2021, the comics story being a parable about just such a thing.
    Anyway, last June 4, the entire first season of Sweet Tooth came to our Netflix-subscribing screens. And, although ten days later another comic book series-derived fantasy drama, the animated Filipino tv series Trese, would be launched on the same platform, what makes Sweet Tooth different is its practical function as a parable, as we mentioned, strengthened as such by the writers' bent toward better fitting the story into current concerns both biological and political/social.
    Which cannot be said about Trese, being a fantasy drama that one would be hard-pressed to read as an allegory of current paradigms. Unless, of course, it is read as a perfect right-leaning superhero oeuvre sympathetic to Fox News’ ideals of female beauty and to a rightist philosophy concerning the police’s humanity and eagerness to self-fix, which reading, however, we're unsure if the comics’ author would be happy with. In short, it doesn’t achieve what a parable would relatively readily do as a closed text. When a duwende in Trese reveals a weakness for Choc Nut, for example, what could that mean, except perhaps that it nationalistically prefers a Pinoy chocolate to something imported? When Gus in Sweet Tooth displays unabashed delight at the act of shoving gummies into his mouth, the context is not so hard to squeeze from the candy of juvenile sweetness.
    We also think Sweet Tooth widened its span toward an audience of different tastes (and different pandemic-coping systems) when Lemire and series developer Jim Mickle decided to lighten the narrative up a bit, above its dark allusions, incorporating a bunch of that cuteness that we mentioned and humour as well into the series atmosphere of unending militarism and fatal social paranoia and panic.
    Anyway, here’s what some critics wrote:
    Kylie Cheung in salon.com: "Sweet Tooth is especially compelling as many of us move toward some form of post-pandemic normalcy, raising questions about what new world awaits us after such tremendous, collective loss."

    John Doyle in The Globe and Mail: "Sweet Tooth feels awfully familiar at first, and then goes places that surprise and delight."

    Euan Ferguson in The Observer: "My heart had sunk: not another dystopia/fantasy/gothic kids' tale gussied up to con adults into watching two-and-a-bit episodes? But it's really rather lovely."

    Robert Levin in Newsday: “Packages real-world terrors in a fashion that at once confronts them honestly and contextualizes them in a way that's friendly for young teen viewers.”
    Sherin Nicole in idobi.com: "Brilliant. You're horrified but you're also giddy because this fable mixed with a thriller is so well done."