Young women carrying out harsh vigilante justice have cropped up in pop culture only a handful of times in recent memory — see Ellen Page’s calculated killer in Hard Candy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, or the vengeful girls of The Craft. But they have limits. They’re painted either with petty concerns and narrow targets or the physical inability to carry out their vendettas long-term.
MTV’s Sweet / Vicious is different. In the very first episode, sorority girl-cum-vigilante Jules (Eliza Bennett) beats up a serial date rapist with a bat while Charli XCX squeaks out a love song in the background. When green-haired stoner Ophelia (Taylor Dearden) tries to back her up, she accidentally kills the guy with a wrench and then pukes hot pink bile all over him. Minutes later, Ophelia and Jules belt Wicked’s “Defying Gravity” together in the car — both to calm their nerves and to present a thesis statement for the series. You can think of them more or less as witches: powerful girls hovering above the human plane and deploying violence in a way that can be judged harshly or empathetically but isn’t really under anyone’s dominion. It’s weird as hell, and a brilliant start for a pulpy revenge saga — created by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and a mostly female creative team.
By building up young vigilantes who are both smart and physically powerful enough not to get caught (yet), Sweet / Vicious unfurls a thrilling fantasy of a world in which girls have a major say in both defining justice and executing it.
As Jules explains to Ophelia post-manslaughter (accidental!), what she does is pretty simple: she hunts down campus sex criminals who have been unjustly ignored by the school administration or by law enforcement and beats the shit out of them. When she spits out her mission statement, which has a lot of buzzwords about “justice” and innocents getting hurt by bad people, Ophelia nods slowly before offering, “That’s the plot of Batman.” Jules rolls her eyes at the semi-obvious quips, but she is modeled after Batman in more ways than the someone’s-gotta-do-justice ethos. Vigilantism is a reaction to structural inequality of power. Batman was a logical response to his time, an era in which men needed a fantastical rich dude who fought for justice on crime-ridden streets. Similarly, Sweet / Vicious’ duo is a logical response to the reality of being a young woman in the world right now.