Swarm, which credits Malia Obama as a writer, is said to follow a young woman whose obsession with a Beyoncé-like pop star reaches dangerous levels.
Donald Glover has signed on to co-create Swarm, an upcoming television series inspired by the “dark and unexpected” superfandom of pop stars. According to Vanity Fair, the project dives into the territory of toxic stan culture and the internet, through the story of a young girl obsessed with a famous musician, who is said to be based on Beyoncé. Swarm will stream on Amazon Prime sometime this year.
Glover — who is no stranger to the spotlight and its accompanying fandom due to his music project as Childish Gambino — said the show is “a post-truth Piano Teacher mixed with The King of Comedy.” Co-creator Janine Nabers, meanwhile — who also worked on the series Watchmen — said the creative team was “really interested in creating an anti-hero story… through the lens of a Black, modern-day woman.”
Actress Dominique Fishbeck will play a superfan whose obsession with a Beyoncé stand-in takes her down some dangerous paths. Snowfall actor Damson Idris will play her boyfriend, while musician Chloe Bailey — who forms one-half of the Chloe x Halle music duo signed to Beyoncé’s label, Parkwood — has also joined the cast. Meanwhile, Malia Obama, the eldest daughter of Barrack, will help pen some of the show’s script.
“[Malia] is somebody who’s gonna have really good things coming soon,” Glover said of the former First Daughter in a 2022 interview. “Her writing style is great.” Swarm, a name eerily similar to the collective Beyoncé fandom called ‘Hive’, certainly has ample material to pull from. The biggest pop stars often spawn collective nouns for their respective bases, be it Nicki Minaj’s ‘Barbz’, Taylor Swift’s ‘Swifties’, or Rihanna’s ‘The Navy’.
Here at Happy Mag, we’ve covered the sometimes wholesome, sometimes toxic, reaches of music fans, be it the construction of a life-sized Swift cut-out along a busy UK tram commute, joint efforts to have Metallica cancelled, or prompting mid-set storm offs by throwing projectiles at Kid Cudi. By those incidents alone Swarm looks to be a true case of art imitating life. See more stills from from Donald Glover’s Swarm series below.
