The Body choreographs an effectively spooky routine

Teen thriller remixes ’00s hits into an entertaining Netflix mash-up.

By Brian Tallerico | November 11, 2026 | 7:00am

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

TV Reviews The Body

The Body choreographs an effectively spooky routine

Quinn Shephard understands the distinct dynamic that forms in groups of teenage girls. She used that awareness to great effect in Hulu’s excellent Under The Bridge, a show that refused to turn its teen characters into stereotypes, focusing instead on how villains are often products of a broken system that doesn’t care enough to listen to young people. With The Body she pivots from that limited series’ tragic true story to something equally ambitious: An eight-chapter genre hybrid that owes as much to Jennifer’s Body as it does traditional teen dramedies. (“Dario Argento’s Riverdale” isn’t that off the mark as a shorthand for what to expect here.) Being a teenager can feel like a nightmare under normal conditions, and Shephard smartly uses the common subject matter like burgeoning sexuality, drug use, and even religion to tell an uncommon story that might even have a tinge of the supernatural. After all, it’s not mass psychosis if the Devil is actually involved.

The Body centers on the Lions, the dance troupe who essentially run their small-town Catholic school, Saint Mark’s, circa 2004. Led by team captains Anya (Kristina Bogic) and Elise (Sara Boustany)—this cult of choreography’s Betty and Veronica—the Lions need to induct a new member for the upcoming season. Tryouts introduce two key figures into the mix: an awkward outsider named Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros) and the obvious stand-out, Grace Franklin (Sofia Wylie).

Of course, Grace gets the gig, and a Halloween party brings the whole group together at just the right time for an initiation ritual. As drugs and booze flow, the girls call on the devil to give them the power they need to win at regionals. It’s all silly teen stuff, but Grace ends up in a coma, presumably from some bad ecstasy, but maybe not? The doctors can’t figure out what’s going on with her, while Lisbeth takes this opportunity to work her way into the group, feeding on stories of the devil and even reported sightings of a ghostly Grace. As panic grips the community (to the tune of a banging ’00s soundtrack), Grace’s friends and family respond to the otherworldly in different ways.

Shephard and her team of writers take teen drama issues and weave them into an aesthetic inspired by works like The Craft and Carrie and even stories of the Salem witch trials. The Body’s eight episodes comprise several traditional arcs—a potential love affair between Anya and Elise, the girls putting their Christian upbringings to the test, and how financial and social outcasts like Lisbeth, her brother Leo (Jackson Kelly) and their mentally ill mother Catherine (Louisa Krause) are treated by the community. Shephard never goes for cheap nostalgia or obvious camp (though she has made a frequently funny show), keeping her focus on the people navigating the difficulties of both adolescence—and possibly demonic possession. She uses the impossible both as a stand-in for the unknowns of post-high school life and as a challenge to everything these well-rounded characters believe in.

It helps to have a uniformly strong cast that understands the assignment— even if most of them hadn’t been born in 2004. They’re all good, but Boustany is the stand-out, taking what could have been just a typical mean-girl role and making it more of an audience surrogate—Elise is the only one skeptical of Lisbeth’s nonsense about Grace’s condition and possible possession. The show foregrounds how unlikely it is that uber-popular Anya would ally herself with Lisbeth, but it’s Elise who really connects those two characters—through her romantic chemistry with Anya and her ability to see through Lisbeth’s manipulations.

Nnamdi Asomugha gets The Body’s juiciest adult role as Father Franklin, who isn’t just a religious leader at Saint Mark’s but also Grace’s uncle. As he sits by her bedside, Asomugha subtly plays a growing crisis of faith, especially as more of his students claim to see his niece in moments of religious rapture. The former NFL cornerback has a warm and inviting screen presence that makes him believable as a moral guidepost without ever reducing Father Franklin to the tsk-tsking adult in the room.

Perhaps the most effective thing about The Body is its craft. The cinematographers and directors bring a consistently strong visual language, one that uses the shadows and light of Saint Mark’s to dread-inducing effect. There’s actual atmosphere in the spaces the characters occupy in The Body, a sense that these halls are filled with both moral conflict and possibly even physical threat. It’s a thriller that doesn’t rely on twists as much as maintain tension from beat to beat, keeping viewers and the characters equally on edge.

It’s also thematically so much stronger than most teen fiction. Sure, the plot points are standard issue, but they’re all smartly filtered through the lenses of faith, community, and even sexuality. Characters who have had it all most of their lives start to wonder what that means, and maybe even if they’re going to Heaven or Hell when it’s all done. Teenagers often face their own mortality on TV, but rarely has it come with such a heady dose of existentialism.

As is so often the case with streaming originals, The Body is just a bit too long. It’s hard to maintain the momentum of something like this for eight episodes, and that becomes apparent in the back half, especially after a fifth-episode peak. It also reaches a conclusion that’s a bit unsatisfying in light of the chaos that comes before it. Although that could be because Shephard and company wanted to leave just enough doors open for a follow-up.

In the end, the devil is in the details of The Body, a show that doesn’t talk down to viewers and refuses to shade adolescent questions of saviors and sinners in mockery. Shephard loves all of her characters, even the mean girls, and it’s that love that is her show’s salvation.

The Body premieres on Netflix Wednesday, November 11.

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