Started watching The Society last night - not to be confused with the excellent 80s body-horror film of nearly the same name - and it seems quite promising after the first episode. The premise is that a load of high school students get evacuated from the town where they live because of a mysterious, nauseating smell that pervades the whole area, which has no apparent source but is presumed to be a health hazard, so they're all loaded into buses and packed off for an impromptu field trip while the smell is investigated. Hours pass, night falls, and the students are eventually dropped off - right back where they started (or so it seems). The town is completely deserted, and while the kids can phone each other, they're unable to reach their parents, emergency services, or anyone else outside the town. Attempts to leave the town the next day are aborted after all the roads and railway lines are found to be blocked.
I suppose it both does and doesn't conform to the well established clichés of this sort of TV. It's like, oh look, some preternaturally good-looking teenagers (they're all slim and don't have a single spot between them) having friendships, enmities and love triangles, and basically doing Normal Teen Stuff, in an apparently idyllic small town in Middle America - I wonder if All Is Not As It Seems? But this is sort of subverted by the weird smell being introduced in the very first scene, and the premise is set up before the episode is halfway over. The actors are, I guess, maybe 19- and 20-year-olds playing 17-year-olds, but at least they're not 25 like in Twin Peaks.
The most obvious point of comparison is Lord Of The Flies, and we've already got one character set up as the smart, sensible kid who wants to find rational explanations and practical solutions to problems, whose foil is the sociopathic bully and would-be dictator. And a scene where the kids help themselves in an abandoned supermarket is straight out of Dawn Of The Dead. But the most interesting point, I think, is that the show is from 2019, and seems very prescient in its depiction of ordinary life being turned upside down by an invisible, threatening Thing in the air, and how people can react either by banding together or turning in each other...