Them Season 1 scores 8/10 for woke messaging by making 1950s racism, redlining, and generational trauma the sole engine of every scare and character arc. Skip it if you want horror without the nonstop political lecture.
Them Season 1 centers its entire premise on a Black family—the Emorys (Lucky played by Deborah Ayorinde, Henry by Ashley Thomas, daughters Ruby and Gracie)—relocating from North Carolina to an all-white 1953 Compton neighborhood, where mundane racist hostility from neighbors like Betty Wendell (Alison Pill) merges with supernatural evil as the core conflict.
Episodes explicitly depict housing covenants, redlining, slurs, assaults, and flashbacks to prior racist violence, framing these as the foundational 'terror in America' that drives every plot turn and character arc over the 10-day timeline. Creator Little Marvin has stated the series was inspired by real racist housing practices and his intent to center Black families in a domestic thriller to document generational trauma and weaponized public/private spaces, while executive producer Lena Waithe described it as amplifying marginalized voices through an unflinching look at the darker Black experience.
Methodology: Each score synthesizes audience discourse, critic and aggregator reception, and press coverage — weighed against the work itself, not any single source.
See how this title scores across all 5 woke subcategories with detailed explanations.
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We've run a full content analysis on Them - Season 1 and scored it 8/10 on the woke scale. Read our detailed breakdown above to see exactly what we found.
Our analysis checks for themes like identity politics, race-swapping, gender ideology, environmental activism, anti-religious messaging, and other progressive agenda elements. The score breakdown above shows which specific categories were flagged and how heavily they factor into Them - Season 1's overall score.
Wokeometer focuses on ideological content rather than traditional ratings (violence, language, etc.). Them - Season 1 is rated TV-MA. For a full picture, combine our woke analysis with the age ratingto decide if it's right for your family.
We evaluate media across multiple ideological categories on a 0–10 scale. Scores of 0–3 mean story-first, 4–6 have moderate elements, and 7–10 flag heavily agenda-driven content. Learn more about our methodology →
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