Courtesy of Netflix SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The Body,” now streaming on Netflix.
If you’re looking for clear answers about whether or not God is real in the world of “The Body” — Netflix’s spooky new drama series about mass hysteria originating from a Catholic school dance team — you’re not going to find them.
“If we ever fully defined it, it would break the rule of the show,” says creator Quinn Shephard. “The show is meant to mimic faith, so there’s people who believe, there’s people who don’t and there’s people in the middle, like me, who are like, ‘I don’t know.’”
But regardless of whether it’s the big man upstairs or just some devious teenage girls pulling the strings, “The Body” has a lot to say about faith and its role in the lives of young and sometimes queer girls. Shephard is a proud lesbian who was raised in the church and has stepped away from it without fully rejecting it, and the show’s up-and-down relationship with God is a product of that.
At the beginning of “The Body,” a devout Catholic named Grace (Sofia Wylie) is the clear standout at dance team tryouts, much to the chagrin of some of the team’s more senior members, who roll their eyes at her rule-following innocence. Thus, she’s put through a bit of hazing: At a Halloween party at an abandoned convent, she’s pressured to take Ecstasy by Elise (Sara Boustany), the team’s co-captain and resident badass, as everyone jokingly perform a ritual meant to sacrifice her soul to the devil. But the devil doesn’t seem to know that they’re joking. Anya (Kristina Bogic), who is Elise’s co-captain and the most popular girl in school, notices that Grace has wandered off alone. Alongside Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros), an awkward new girl who got rejected from the team in favor of Grace, she finds Grace on the ground, convulsing until she passes out. Anya and Lisbeth decide to take her to a hospital, but on the way, Grace appears to die. Because Anya supplied the Ecstasy, she’s terrified she’ll get in trouble. Lisbeth sees this as her way onto the dance team and into Anya’s good graces, and takes charge. They take Grace’s body back to her own house and tuck her into bed, then use Grace’s phone to text a friend that she got home safe, giving themselves plausible deniability. But at the end of the first episode, Grace takes a breath.
She doesn’t wake all the way up, though, and spends the rest of the season in a coma as the dance team is wracked with guilt about the Ecstasy, which they don’t confess about. Needing support from the only other person who knows what happened, Anya brings Lisbeth onto the dance team to take Grace’s place, which intensifies the conflict between Anya and Elise. The two best friends are clearly in love with each other, and had been fooling around sexually at the party, but Anya insists that she’s straight and loyal to her boyfriend, Steven (Orlando Norman). Frustrated by Anya’s new closeness to Lisbeth, and with latent suspicion about Anya’s role in what happened to Grace, Elise fakes a spiritual experience, shrieking in front of the whole school that she’s having a vision of Grace. But everyone on the team — except Anya and Lisbeth, of course — buys into it. One by one, they begin faking their own visions. Soon, the whole town starts to believe that Grace is all-powerful, chosen by God to perform healing miracles from her apparent deathbed. People gather on her family’s lawn to worship her.
Left to right: Kyra Pierce as Bailey, Sarah Abbot as Olivia, Michela Luci as Amy, Kristina Bogic as Anya, Shirley Chen as Maddie Courtesy of Netflix Lisbeth is delighted, using her relationship with Anya to increase her social standing at school and to protect her brother, Leo (Jackson Kelly), who at one point drew suspicion because of his crush on (and lewd drawings of) Grace. But eventually, Elise pieces together the truth, forcing Anya to confess to Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha), the school principal and pastor. At that exact moment, though, Grace finally wakes up. Weakly, she whispers, “I’m God.”
Shepherd spoke with Variety about Catholicism, lesbian camp and who-slash-what God is.
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