‘Scavengers Reign’ Might Be the Most Underrated Show of the Year

You probably haven’t heard much about the most remarkable genre show of 2023.

I can make that claim with some confidence, because I didn’t know anything about Scavengers Reign until it had already aired half its episodes, and I’m a sci-fi enthusiast who works for a pop culture website.

But against a saturated slate of genre offerings from Star Wars and the MCU, plus non-Disney fare like The Last of Us, Silo, Foundation Season 2, and Amazon’s anti-superhero empire, this little animated project about humans stranded on an alien planet is the most captivating, original science fiction to reach screens in some time.

So let me sell you on the series, which you can now watch in its entirety on Max; Scavengers Reign aired the last of its 12 half-hour episodes on Thursday.

Scavengers Reign is the creation of Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner, TV novices who loosely adapted the show from a wacky eight-minute short they made in 2016. It follows the survival efforts of five main characters after their starship malfunctions and they’re forced to take escape pods down to the surface of a mysterious planet, Vesta Minor. The pods land far from one another, leaving three groups that are unaware anyone else survived: Ursula and Sam, a practical duo with technical know-how; Azi and her robot friend Levi, who transforms as Vesta’s fungi infect the machine’s hardware; and Kamen, who starts the show alone but soon forms a dangerous symbiotic relationship with a local predator.

The character arcs are mostly satisfying, but they’re not the real draw here. Neither is the survival plot. For Scavengers, the typical story beats come secondary to the astonishing world-building, which is among the most immersive and inventive I’ve ever seen.

That distinction starts with Scavengers’ gorgeous 2D animation, which was inspired by the art of Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki, particularly the latter’s environmentalist masterpiece Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Vesta’s biology is illustrated with soft curves and vibrant colors, and the animation allows the real star of the show—its world—to flourish.

Courtesy of Max

Many alien planets in science fiction tend to suffer from a lack of variety. They often have just one or two different habitats, which host only one or two native creatures. This approach makes logistical sense, especially for stories filmed in live action and adventures that involve planet-hopping. In Star Wars, for instance, it helps to remember the simple shorthand that Tatooine is the desert planet or that Endor is the home of the Ewoks.

Yet that approach isn’t always ideal in an inherently imaginative genre because it doesn’t create as realistic of a setting. Imagine a group of aliens who are separated before landing in different spots across Earth. The one that lands in Siberia will have a much different conception of this new planet and its wildlife than the ones that land in the Sahara, or Japan, or New Orleans.

In Scavengers, the five survivors are essentially the alien visitors in that scenario, while Vesta is a fully realized world with extensive biological diversity. Across 12 episodes, the characters traverse canyons and coastlines, mountains and forests, rapids and plains, each with their own color palette and community of creatures. Scavengers doesn’t just design an animal or two; it builds entire ecosystems.

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Throughout the series, dozens of creatures crawl and creep and whiz across the screen. Some directly influence the plot, like predators that attack with fangs bared and claws extended, putting the characters’ lives in danger. Others are useful as tools for the survivors, who use bioluminescent critters as flashlights and the discarded shells of giant insects as canoes. Yet the majority of life on Vesta exists merely as scenery flourishes, like background characters going about their lives—sipping water from a lake, chomping on fruit, climbing a tree—as a protagonist walks by. “I don’t know much about sci-fi, so for me, it was just a coincidence that Scavengers Reign became a sci-fi show,” Bennett told Gizmodo last month. “Really, I look at it more as a nature series.”

The imagination doesn’t stop there. The sounds produced by all the flora and fauna also convey a sense of alien spectacle; a subplot midway through the series focuses on a character’s use of a digital recorder to capture the entrancing alien noises all around him. (On another auditory note, composer Nicolas Snyder’s score is fantastic.)

All of this world-building rests on a delicate balance between the foreign and the familiar. With many of the show’s creations, writer Sean Buckelew told The Hollywood Reporter, “You can imagine the physics of this thing on Earth, but it’s also totally strange and nothing you’ve ever seen.”

Courtesy of Max

To that point, some creatures have Earth analogues, at least in aesthetics, such as small bugs and a vicious crab-like hunter that attacks two protagonists in an early action scene. But others are more bizarre and less easily described in text. With this particular group, Scavengers’ horror elements arise.

Scavengers doesn’t shy away from horror throughout its 12-episode run, from the body horror of a trippy hallucination in the pilot to the psychological horror of isolation present until the very end. It’s obvious, in places, why the show’s creators cite Annihilation as another inspiration. Be warned that there is a fair share of (animated) gore and plenty of ooze and slime.

Yet for the most part, the apparent monsters the protagonists encounter aren’t villains, per se. They just want to protect their homes, or gather food, or propagate their species. It just so happens that the unfamiliar humans seem like home invaders or a potential meal.

“Predators, prey, parasites, and symbiotic relationships are all normal in [a natural] ecosystem,” Buckelew told Gizmodo. “But once you put a human in the middle of it, it can be uncomfortable or appear evil, when it’s really just neutral.”

The horror elements never overwhelm the overall tone of the show, though; the scares appear in almost equal measure with the wonders of exploring Vesta Minor and its many attractions. Almost all of these spectacles are shown, not told; Scavengers has dialogue, unlike the 2016 short, but it’s minimal and often absent from the most crucial scenes. The creators said they took inspiration from the popular Primitive Technology YouTube channel, in which an Australian man wordlessly builds contraptions, accompanied by only the natural sounds in his yard.

The effect in Scavengers is brilliant. For instance, the third episode, “The Wall,” portrays two breathtakingly beautiful sequences with almost no dialogue as Azi faces down a stampede of horse-like beasts and Ursula observes a haunting ceremony of death and rebirth within the titular wall.

That latter scene serves no purpose for the plot. In fact, it leads to an argument between characters—the first of several over the course of the show—about whether it’s acceptable to pause to appreciate beauty amid a quest for survival, which is reminiscent of Station Eleven’s “Survival is insufficient” message.

I agree with Ursula in this debate. I, too, want to stop and luxuriate in this world. After all, we audience members don’t have to survive its threats; we can just enjoy the marvels on display.

And I’m not alone. On Rotten Tomatoes, Scavengers has a 100 percent rating from critics (albeit only 11 of them) and a 96 percent audience score. And IMDb users have given the show an average rating of nine out of 10. Sure, it has a relatively small sample of reviews, and sure, sci-fi shows might benefit from a genre bias, but those data points offer a strong consensus that this new world is worth your time.

You should watch Scavengers Reign if you like Studio Ghibli films or bright colors or animation more broadly. You should also watch it if you like nature hikes or Planet Earth or trips to the zoo, or if you like sci-fi world-building or space horror or alien adventures. Scavengers Reign might have come out of nowhere, but it’s a shining star in its genre and a brilliant execution of an original idea.