Summary
Class of ’07‘s cast is its strongest weapon, keeping this distinctly Aussie take on the survivalist genre fun and funny throughout its entire run.
This review of the Prime Video series Class of ’07 Season 1 does not contain spoilers.
High school reunions are such a uniquely awful concept that I’m surprised it has taken this long for somebody to use one as the backdrop to the end of the world. But it’s a genius idea, really. Surviving the apocalypse is hard enough. Doing it with the people you hated in school and have been avoiding for a decade since seems almost impossible.
Class of ’07 Season 1 review and plot summary
This is the hook of Class of ’07, a Prime Video survivalist comedy that peddles icky gross-out laughs and eye-widening brutality with all the spiteful enthusiasm you’d imagine a gang of 28-year-olds could be capable of after being marooned in the remnants of their old all-girls high school. The cause of the calamity is some kind of vague climate disaster that ruptures the ground and sends water spurting up through the cracks. Before long, everything is flooded, and the old campus becomes a floating island from which escape seems impossible and survival – at least for most – increasingly unlikely.
Emily Browning, familiar from stuff like the Tom Hardy Kray twins movie Legend and American Gods, leads the cast as Zoe, who races from a period of self-imposed isolation after a reality show debacle to warn the rest of the girls of the impending disaster. Nobody listens, though, partly because of Zoe’s lingering toxicity and partly because she has a reputation for overexaggerating, so she ends up getting drunk and dancing the night away until the old “fingering bench” sinks underwater, promptly followed by most of the building.
This leaves the attendees of the reunion to fend for themselves. Needless to say, their charisma is what the plot burns for fuel, so it’s just as well that we have a great selection of funny performers playing diverse roles here. Zoe’s former best friend Amelia (Megan Smart), who disappeared from high school halfway through the year, is obviously hiding plenty about the cause of her sudden disappearance and her present-day life. Saskia (Caitlin Stasey, a standout) is the former stuck-up bully who has reinvented herself as mature and tolerant – but for how long? Fussy narc former school captain Genevieve (Claire Lovering) wants to be the leader. Scholarship student Phoebe (Steph Tisdell) is mostly annoyed at being stuck with all the rich girls who were handed all the things she had to work for. And wild card drug-enthusiast besties Megan (Chi Nguyen) and Tegan (Bernie Van Tiel) are too high to have really figured out what’s going on and remain so for long enough that everyone else’s chances of survival plummet even further, especially since the group’s “doctor”, Renee (Emma Horn), is really a nail technician.
This is all funny, but Class of ’07 knows that it needs to be more than funny to sustain eight episodes, even if they’re only a half-hour each, so both the script and the performances have a bit more depth and nuance than the archetypes would suggest. There’s enough in the way of shared history, kept secrets, and unaddressed traumas to keep the interpersonal plots as engaging as the end-of-the-world stuff, and it’s rich in character without allowing what is obviously an ample budget to do too much heavy lifting on its own. A nostalgia-bait soundtrack helps to evoke a recently bygone era and stir a few emotions here and there.
Is Class of ’07 good?
There’s an Aussie specificity to the humor and a lot of the references that a global audience might find off-putting or confounding (you know what a shoey is, I hope), and the short episode runtimes rarely leave much room for more depth in subplots and character arcs that could probably have done with it. But the show settles into a nice rhythm as it goes along and remains entertaining for its entire run, which is more than you can say for a lot of streaming originals nowadays. Anyone wistful for the mid-2000s will probably be well-served here, and it’s worth a look if you think Yellowjackets needs more laughs, or The Lord of the Flies needs more women and drugs.
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