The Body: 'Slutty God' Drops a Catholic School Dance Team Straight Into Hysteria

Halloween night, 2004. The Lions — the dance team at St. Mark’s Catholic school — have one open spot, and two hopefuls want it: Grace Franklin, devout and determined, and Lisbeth Anderson, the new kid looking in from the outside. Netflix’s own episode synopsis keeps the rest plain: after the auditions, the squad initiates its new teammate in a hell-raising Halloween ritual.

The series synopsis tells you where that night points. After a dance-team initiation gone wrong, a group of badly behaved Catholic schoolgirls begin having prophetic visions that set off mass hysteria in their town. That is the whole promise going in, and “Slutty God” — the 58-minute premiere, written and directed by series creator Quinn Shephard — spends its hour making you feel how fast a team, a school and a town could tip.

What worked

The tone, first. Shephard told Netflix’s Tudum she “literally made this for my teen self,” and called the show “gritty camp — a raunchy teen psychodrama with a dash of Catholic horror.” The premiere actually plays like that. It is funny in the way real friend groups are funny, mean in the way tryouts are mean, and then the floor moves.

ScreenRant named The Body the No. 1 Netflix binge of this week before it dropped, and the premiere earns the pick on setup alone. One open spot sounds small. On this team it is everything — status, safety, a whole social life — and the episode never lets you forget the price of being left outside the circle.

Here is the line I kept coming back to after it ended: the scariest ritual in “Slutty God” isn’t the initiation. It’s how badly everybody in it wants to belong.

The 2004 of it all helps more than I expected. This is a world of landline logic and hallway gossip, where a rumor has to travel mouth to mouth — and somehow that makes the hysteria feel closer, not quaint. Word moves fast in a small town when everybody already goes to the same church.

The performances

Kristina Bogic runs the premiere as Anya Butler, the Lions’ captain. Netflix built its pre-premiere campaign around her — “the perfect captain, the perfect life, the perfect cover” — and Bogic plays exactly that tension: polished on the surface, doing math behind her eyes in every scene.

Sofia Wylie gives Grace a sincerity that could have gone flat in lesser hands. Grace wants in, and Wylie never plays her as naive for wanting it. Geena Meszaros, as Lisbeth, is the premiere’s quiet weapon — watch how much she does just standing at the edge of rooms, deciding what belonging might cost her. Sara Boustany’s Elise, the co-captain and Anya’s best friend, grounds the team’s inner circle, and Gabby Windey — the Traitors winner making her scripted acting debut as Coach Miller — fits the 2004 energy so naturally you stop clocking the casting story within minutes.

My one nitpick, and it is a small one: the Lions are a big squad, and the premiere introduces them at speed. I spent the first stretch putting names to faces when I wanted to just be watching. It settles — but you will work a little early.

Score: 8/10. A premiere that knows its premise is a live wire and trusts it — funny, unsettled, and very hard to leave on episode one when all eight are sitting right there.

My take:

The Body is built on one question the synopsis asks and the premiere refuses to answer cheaply: did something real visit these girls, or did a town primed for miracles build one out of a bad night? I have my lean. I’m not spending it yet — episode two gets to argue back first. So tell me where you landed after “Slutty God”: are you Team Something Actually Happened That Night, or Team This Town Needed a Miracle and Made One?