I can't look away from Scavengers Reign

The streaming era operates via a cold and opaque calculus. Many shows unceremoniously premiere with limited promotion, only to be quickly canceled with an equal lack of fanfare. With no real numbers and no dubious reports available to the public and creators (now a little less dubious, thanks to the Writers Guild of America strike), the fate of a series can feel like a cosmic joke, with no rhyme or reason why some soldier on and some never gets the chance to find an audience. Scavengers Reign, the jaw-dropping animated series that debuted on Max last year, found its numbers up when the streamer canceled it earlier in May. But in a rare moment of clarity, there's a path forward for the show: It just has to be a hit starting Friday, when it premieres on Netflix.

Its new summer home (Scavengers Reign is still available to stream on Max) is reportedly considering a Season 2 renewal in anticipation of the show's Netflix debut, but what a favorable run looks like isn't very clear. Mostly, this is just an excuse to exercise a rare bit of the streaming era: check out Scavengers Reign, one of the very best shows of last year, and the rare series that earns the superlative "like nothing else on television" simply thanks be its stunning visual design.

Taking visual cues from European sci-fi artists such as Moebius and Simon Roy, Scavengers Reign tells the aftermath of a disaster aboard the spacecraft Demeter, after a handful of survivors escape to the alien world of Vesta Minor, a hauntingly beautiful and hostile planet. Still, survival is only a secondary concern for show creators Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner. Instead, the pair use Scavengers Reign as an exercise in creating a truly alien world, with all the awe and horror that entails. As our reviewer wrote when the show premiered last fall: