The Rhetoric of Transgression in Wynonna Earp
presented at the 2022 Southwest popular and American Culture Conference in Albuquerque, NM
INTRODUCTION: Who (and what) is Wynonna Earp?
Gunslingers. Demons. Military black ops. Sapphic romance. These televisual tropes may sound discordant, but they all come together to create a whole greater than its parts in SyFy’s Wynonna Earp. Based on the mid-1990s graphic novel series of the same name, Wynonna Earp premiered on SyFy in 2016. Created by showrunner Emily Andras, who previously helmed both Lost Girl and Killjoys for SyFy, the show centers on sisters Wynonna and Waverly Earp as they protect their geographically nonspecific western town, called Purgatory, from demons and other supernatural threats. The title sequence gives you a pretty good feel for the show’s aesthetic, plus I just like title sequences:
The outlandishness of the premise is echoed by the outlandishness of the show itself; it’s deeply generically hybrid, occupying an interstitial space between westerns, police procedurals, horror, and mystery, with a constant thread of comedic self-awareness that undergirds the narrative. The plots are often comically complex, the villains are excessively flamboyant, and the special effects are winkingly lowbrow—a combination very much in keeping with the high concept, modest budget network aesthetic of SyFy, even if its “paranormal weird western” format is somewhat of an outlier. Wynonna Earp wrapped up in 2021 at the end of season 4, although the possibility of continuing on another network has been floated by Andras herself.
The basic premise of the show is this: Wynonna Earp (Melanie Scrofano), great-great-great granddaughter of famed US Marshal Wyatt Earp, returns to her hometown of Purgatory—situated in the nebulous American “west” but somewhere adjoining the Canadian border—and discovers that she has inherited the mantle of being the Earp Heir, the person tasked with exterminating the Revenants—the group of demonic bad guys who were originally killed by Wyatt Earp and who reincarnate every time a new Heir comes of age at 27. Much to her chagrin, Wynonna alone can wield Peacemaker—Wyatt’s gun, shown here—which is the only weapon that can dispatch the Revenants back to hell. Because of this, she gets part hired/ part blackmailed into working for the Black Badge Division, a black ops subset of the US Marshalls who have a somewhat implausible authority in both the US and Canada, where she’s “handled”/ managed/ trained by Deputy Marshal Xavier Dolls (Shamier Anderson). She’s also helped by a rather motley crew of associates, including her younger sister Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkely), who is an amazing researcher, Waverly’s girlfriend Deputy Nicole Haught (Katherine Barrell), who knows how to use a bulletproof vest, Black Badge lab tech Jeremy Chetri (Varun Saranga), and eventually by Sherriff Randy Nedley (Greg Lawson). She’s also helped by the sometimes morally-gray and seemingly immortal Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon), who was Wyatt’s best friend and becomes Wynonna’s sometimes-paramour.
(By the way, this is Mutt from Schitt’s Creek.)
As you can see from even this short glimpse, both thematically and aesthetically, it’s influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural with a side of Justified, yet it never reached the critical acclaim or viewership that those predecessors did. It performed well for a SyFy show, but as the finale was airing, SyFy was only ranked 25th amongst networks in terms of viewership, and in its 1st season, Wynonna Earp’s Nielsen ratings indicate it averaged 558,000 viewers per episode, but by the 4th season, that had dropped to 302,2000 (“U.S. Cable TV Network & Program Rankings”; “Wynonna Earp: Season One Ratings”, “Wynonna Earp: Season Four Ratings”). These numbers mean less in our streaming era, but they do illustrate that it was still largely invisible in the wider culture of TV viewership. Still, it garnered a loyal fanbase called “Earpers,”—more on them later—but it also was the site of a particularly transgressive rhetoric that stood out amongst its contemporaries because of the way it handled race, gender, and sexuality.
What’s important about Wynonna Earp isn’t just that “it’s good, actually”—even though it is—but rather that it participates in the tradition of revolutionary television that exists on the fringe, and by virtue of not having to be everything to everybody in service of maximizing ad revenue, is capable of pushing the envelope, both creatively and politically.
The show’s pseudo-invisibility sort of ironically grants the show room to grow into a narrative that centers both strong, complex women and queer characters, offering not just a transgression of genre but also a transgression of cultural scripts so often reified by mainstream TV.
FORMAT: Genre Disruptions
Initially pitched to the network as “Justified meets Frozen” by creator and producer Emily Andras, this absurdist shorthand conveys a great deal about the series. It refuses any attempt at tidy generic designation, instead folding together elements of the western, supernatural horror, historic mystery, and even reluctant police procedural—although not in a gross way. It’s also incredibly funny and leans into the camp aesthetic. I’ve seen it categorized as western horror, a supernatural western, a paranormal cop show, a horror comedy, horror kitsch, and western camp—all of which gets at the point that even in format, Wynonna Earp is transgressive media that refuses to fit into neat designations. Vanity Fair calls the show “intensely watchable” mainly because of its mash-up of genres; they go on to say, “What Wynonna Earp lacks in gravitas, it makes up in camp. There’s no semblance of seriousness within its scripts, storylines, or acting, which makes the show shockingly entertaining and undeniably funny, generally on purpose. The dialogue is punchy and quick; the special effects are endearingly bad, like something out of a B-movie.” And the special effects are often pretty bad, to be honest—but that’s part of the hallmark of—and, really, the allure of—the SyFy network. And the show’s lack of pretense is underscored by its self-awareness—there’s a gravitas to the relationships amongst the characters, a constant awareness that concepts like justice and doing what’s right are complicated spectrums, and centers a main character who is a functional alcoholic and a reluctant heroine at best, but that’s all spliced in with pop culture references, horny asides, and dick jokes.
But this self-aware, lowbrow aesthetic means that shows like Wynonna Earp rarely achieve the kind of visibility that prestige TV does; its genre hybridity makes it difficult to categorize, which in turn means that contemporary viewing practices driven by the idea of “curation” often ignore shows like Wynonna Earp, which fly under the radar in terms of broader media coverage and are difficult to prepackage in terms of algorithmically driven viewing. Nonetheless, it’s often lumped in with straight westerns, where it sits awkwardly alongside shows like Longmire and Yellowstone, and that’s because it really belongs to the more specific classification of the weird western. In the intro to their book about weird westerns, Michael Johnson, Rebecca Lush, and Sara Spurgeon argue that “Perhaps one of the distinctive features of the western, as important as the showdown or the desert landscape, is its ability to form unexpected combinations with other genres, and the odd resonance those combinations create between the different genres” (2). The recent designation of weird western incorporates speculative fictions, folding sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, or supernatural themes into the western setting, which you can see at work in films like The Wind or Cowboys vs. Aliens and shows such as Westworld, Firefly, and even The Walking Dead. There’s also long been an element of queerness threatening to erupt in the classic western genre; the weird western gives this queerness a path from subtext to text, and Wynonna Earp is no exception. It also leans into camp—a style that has inextricable ties with queerness, no matter what Susan Sontag says—and these camp inclusions add to the transgressive nature of the show.
THE LIMINAL AS AN ORGANIZING CONCEPT
Wynonna Earp is in many ways built around this concept of the liminal, stemming from its fundamental rejection of a high/ low binary. It’s set in a border town, in a rural area. The Revenants are trapped by in a geographic region called the Ghost River Triangle, which imposes another set of borders that they are constantly looking to escape. The villains and monsters are often a peculiar blend of flamboyance and menace, none moreso than Season 1 big bad, Bobo Delray. We meet Wynonna at a moment of threshold crossing—in the pilot, she has just turned 27, which is the age at which she inherits the mantle of the Earp Heir.
We also meet Waverly at a moment of boundary crossing, as she ends her relationship with local fuckboy Champ and instead slowly finds herself falling for Nicole Haught, the new sheriff’s deputy in town, finally declaring herself bisexual as she and Nicole embark on a long-term relationship that culminates in a series-finale marriage. The Revenants also exist in a weird liminal state themselves, returning from Hell with each new Heir, even if the previous Heir killed them. In Season 2, Wynonna ends up pregnant—a liminal state if ever there was one, and one we seldom see heroines in. Incidentally, when actress Melanie Scrofano got pregnant, rather than hide it—like with Maze in Lucifer—or bully her about her choice, like Joss Whedon did to Charisma Carpenter on Angel—instead Andras wrote her pregnancy into the show, offering a delightfully feminist middle finger to dominant TV paradigms in the process.
CONCLUSION: RESISTANCE TO DOMINANT TV PARADIGMS
Wynonna Earp premiered in 2016, which, incidentally, was the same year TV critic Maureen Ryan dubbed the Spring 2016 TV season as “disposable spring” with regards to queer characters as the use of the seemingly-immortal Bury Your Gays trope crested high with the death of Lexa immediately after consummating her relationship with Clarke on the CW’s 100.It was a moment where fans who are often queerbaited by the media they love—looking at you, Supernatural and Teen Wolf and Falcon and Winter Soldier—were finally given canonical bisexual representation, only to have it immediately ended by violence. Andras saw what happened as the 100’s fandom turned on the showrunner because of the betrayal, and she instead crafted Nicole Haught into what Earpers refer to as the “unkillable queer,” a woman who is in a visibly queer relationship and yet manages to thwart the target on her back that so often confers in popular media. When Nicole is shot, we fear that yet another lesbian has been fridged to provide the main characters with motivation, but no—Nicole has enough sense to wear a bulletproof vest. In fact, Andras had reassured fans that Nicole would survive the season, a compassionate act from a showrunner who understood the trauma such queer deaths can cause viewers. This led to a particularly popular fan edit that was posted all over social media at the time:
Not only is Wynonna Earp unapologetically queer, it also resists other stalwart tropes in the televisual landscape. Rather than a romance, the show centers the sister bond of Wynonna and Waverly, and though they both have various romantic exploits, their relationship is always the most important. It’s also remarkably, refreshingly feminist—the titular character is a woman who is complex, multifaceted, and flawed. Wynonna isn’t perfect—she’s a reluctant heroine, she drinks too much as a way of coping with her traumatic past, and she is often needlessly defiant around authority. But she is also loyal, and she stays in Purgatory to do what’s right, even as that choice causes her more trauma. She constantly problematizes the “strong female character” trope. And since she is not the only woman on the show, she doesn’t have to be reduced to a shorthand for all women—Waverly is a beloved ray of sunshine, Nicole is steadfast and competent, and the other women in the show often frustrate stereotypes in a myriad of ways. The show isn’t trapped by the numbers game of having to have one female character signify the performance of femininity. As a viewer who has been in a long-term abusive relationship with a show like Supernatural, which queerbaits and fridges women and kills its gays and hardly ever passes the Bechdel test, Wynona Earp feels like a panacea, a queer rural feminist utopia, one which is so desperately needed—and one that more people need to see.
WORKS CITED
“U.S. Cable TV Network & Program Rankings.” National Media Spots, https://www.nationalmediaspots.com/us-cable-tv-network-and-program-rankings.php.
“Wynonna Earp: Season Four Ratings.” Canceled + Renewed TV Shows - TV Series Finale, 12 Apr. 2021, https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/wynonna-earp-season-four-ratings/.
“Wynonna Earp: Season One Ratings.” Canceled + Renewed TV Shows - TV Series Finale, 12 Apr. 2021, https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/wynonna-earp-season-four-ratings/.
