‘Wild Cherry’ Review: Rich Girls, Dirty Secrets

A kind of British spin on Euphoria, with its mix of heightened melodrama and simmering suspense, Wild Cherry dives into the volatile, high-stakes lives of a group of teenage girls living in an exclusive, ultra-wealthy enclave called Richford Lake. Influencers to the core—reckless, driven, intense, and constantly courting trouble—the girls also have to contend with their parents (mostly their mothers), who seem no more equipped than they are to navigate everyday life.

The show’s central flaw is its near-total absence of anyone remotely grounded, decent, or even minimally empathetic. These are rich, entitled, insufferable girls, almost entirely incapable of basic human decency. Their lives revolve around social media, content creation, and—above all—keeping people out, making sure no one uncovers the not-so-secret things they do behind closed doors. But when one of those activities spills into the open and lands them in serious trouble at school, things quickly escalate into outright violence. The mothers are drawn into the mix as well: wealthy women who, much like their daughters, are locked in constant competition, trading passive-aggressive barbs and barely concealed hostility.

Part glossy soap opera, part blunt portrait of a performative, image-obsessed present, Wild Cherry centers primarily on a mother-daughter pair. Juliet (Eve Best) is a self-help author who has convinced herself—and her readers—that the best approach to raising teenage girls is to be their friend: give them freedom, don’t interfere, trust that their upbringing will carry them through. According to Juliet, they’ll figure things out on their own. Beneath that rhetoric, however, lies a more personal desire. As the show’s narrator points out, her wealth is inherited—and what she really wants is to reclaim a sense of youth, to escape the dullness of her carefully curated, uneventful adult life.

Her daughter, Allegra (Amelia May), is a nightmare: a haughty, spoiled, cruel 15-year-old who leads a clique straight out of a 2000s teen comedy. She takes particular pleasure in humiliating, belittling, and attacking her mother, and she doesn’t treat her friends much better. Her closest ally is Grace (Imogen Faires), a Black girl from the same affluent world whose mother, Lorna (Carmen Ejogo), worked her way up to that social stratum. While less overtly vicious, Grace and Lorna carry their own tensions and secrets.

Both mothers are summoned by school administrators after a sexually explicit video allegedly involving their daughters begins circulating. The girls deny it, their mothers back them and threaten the school for daring to accuse them—but it soon becomes clear that the video is real. What the girls don’t know is who leaked it. And they’re willing to do whatever it takes to find out.

The girls’ “secret” world revolves around their social media presence: highly sexualized content they produce, which fuels both the central conflict and their friction with school authorities—and with each other. Around them orbit their friends, each with their own issues, and, in parallel, the mothers’ social circle within this gated community: a nest of jealousy, manipulation, and quiet sabotage. When the police eventually step in to investigate a disappearance, the instinct of these families is less to cooperate than to push back, more concerned with protecting their image than uncovering the truth.

There’s a palpable atmosphere here—constant tension, a narrative that slowly unravels—and a structure that begins in chaos (complete with bloodshed) before rewinding to explain how things got there. The problem is that Wild Cherry offers little to hold onto beyond the spectacle of these privileged girls and women tearing each other apart, wrecking lives, triggering cascading crises, and putting multiple people in real danger.

It sits comfortably alongside shows like Big Little Lies—stories that aim to expose the rot beneath wealth and privilege—but pushes things into more exaggerated territory, with as much (if not more) focus on the teenage girls as on the adults. The real weight of the story lies in the disconnect between those two worlds. The mothers assume their daughters’ struggles mirror their own youthful rebellions. But a closer look reveals a different reality altogether. Rumors and jealousy have always been volatile forces at that age—but in the era of social media, they’ve become something closer to life and death.