It’s 1962 and in the unbecoming town of Derry, Maine, the ‘business as usual’ maxim remains at odds with a strange, unsettling undercurrent that appears to have plagued the area for longer than many inhabitants can – or care to – remember.
Young Matty Clements becomes the latest child unable to escape the darkness that lurks within Derry’s borders and other children begin to experience visceral nightmares of their own. Major Leroy Hanlon, a soldier without fear, arrives at the local army base to face a Cold War test unlike any other…. as he and his family also encounter the kind of monsters that are, sadly, all too human…
*some spoilers*
Welcome to Derry also has something of an identity crisis – to mix metaphors: each plate is spinning at a slightly different incline, each thread a differing texture, each personality within its malevolent matrix doing well in its particular tone, but also each vying for attention, making the sum of it uneven and sometimes hard to get a firm footing. It’s the kind of show where you can see where every dime and dollar has been spent and applaud what’s been done well, but still lament that some of the creative seams are showing… the kind of production where you can tell there’s been a push-me-pull-you of intent. Is it American Horror Story with a juvenile bent or a very ‘R’-rated Stranger Things ….the truth is it’s a little of both and not quite either.
The Duffer Brothers’ original Stranger Things leaned in heavily and deliberately to the tone of some of Stephen King’s most celebrated stories, love-letters not just to the 1980s but to that timeless period of adolescence where kids must valiantly battle an innate evil that adults refuse to acknowledge. Part of the Netflix cult success was, at least initially, the sense of Stranger Things‘ dynamic nostalgia – the idea that those of us approaching middle-age (shut-up, get off my lawn etc!) loved the idea of reliving the pop culture and dreams of our youth. That series has got progressively darker (to varying degrees of success) ahead of the upcoming final burst of episodes (and the inevitable aging of its cast), but even at its Kate-Bush-embracing-best, it probably never considered the even stranger things that spring, crawl and drag themselves out of Hell and onto the screen for driving force Andy Muschietti and showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Kane’s efforts.
Yet another extension of the familiar source material and unapologetic connective tissue to accompany Muschietti’s glossy (if not ground-breaking) two-part feature film reboot of ‘IT’, it all feels ambitious but stretched and more than occasionally contradictory. Like Noah Hawley’s recent Alien: Earth, there’s a feeling that everyone’s glad to be allowed access to a legendary toy-box and rubbing their hands together on the possibilities, but that they can’t quite work out how to smash things together to produce anything beyond the sheer noise of that collision….
There’s several disparate threads here: a 1960s take on the Losers Club from the novels, the mystery of what lies near the local military base, the dangers of the evil force infecting the hearts and minds of Derry locals and the general feeling of still-evolving race-relations. Each element deserves their own space to breathe but all too often feel like they are competing for prominence, even when they threaten to interconnect and cross.
The experiences of a black soldier in the army and the reaction within the local community is interesting territory and is reminiscent of how HBO‘s Watchmen also infused history and the shifting moral and social landscape into its more fantastical narrative.
Initially, Welcome to Derry feels confident and full of bravado – its smart title sequence underlies the idea of something rotten under the surface… yet what comes after the titles fade feels far less than ground-breaking than it wants to be. We’ve been here before. Literally. This isn’t the first time that televisual creators have tried to flex the boundaries of King’s world. hulu brought us two seasons of Castle Rock which sought to bring in many narrative threads to a drama set in the infamous titular town, yet despite ambition and an impressive cast (including the likes of André Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Jane Levy, Sissy Spacek and, ironically a pre-Pennywise Bill Skarsgård) it never quite took hold as one might have expected. Welcome to Derry is to Castle Rock, what Torchwood was to Doctor Who and what Sinners was to The Vampire Diaries: a genre embracing the core basics but then going wild on crack.
It’s true that Pennywise, the Deadlights and the entire IT mythology exist on the power of weaponising primal fears to the extent that characters and the audience can never be sure what’s actually happening and what’s merely being conjured up to power-up the batteries of dread. One of the earliest scenes in the first episode features a haunted car and a sequence that can only be described as the birthing sequence from Hell. Little is left to the imagination. Yes, those unearthly visions are meant to be uncomfortable and make you uneasy, but this in particular also feels like a bloodiest, most graphic moment in there for pure shock value, something specifically designed to get the critics chirping and the water-cooler bubbling as if the river Styx itself had decided to boil. To that extent it obviously works, but in doing so it somewhat overplays its hand, adding very little to what could have arguably been done with more suspense and inference rather than in-‘yer-face, on-the-nose embryonic evil goo. King’s strengths were in producing dark magic from the daylight of the mundane, but in going in so heavily on nightmare visions and making them the show’s punctuation (A Nightmare on Elm Street being another touchstone), Derry… sometimes misunderstands the cause and effect. Instead of audiences reveling in the tension and the relief when the wave breaks, it’s more a case of rubbing their faces in the tsunami of an ‘e wwww’ factor… and that can be a law of diminishing returns.
For something that’s a period piece being made by those fully-invested in King-lore (Shawshank Prison gets a nod and the character of Dick Hallorann, originally played by Scatman Crothers in Kubrick’s version of The Shining, turns up here played by Chris Chalk) there’s also some surprising lapses. For every nod, wink and easter egg to the King faithful, there’s a discrepancy or fault-line. A key-part of the opener sees a film screening gone askew (imagine Doctor Who’s LUX done on a bigger budget and designed for a far older audience), with the missing Matty emerging from the screen that’s otherwise The Music Man… only that film wasn’t out for a full three months after the very-specific April 1962 setting. How much such details bother you will vary, but one cannot expect to be praised for the minutiae but be given a pass on prominent factors as well.
Given it is a period-piece, yet another extension of the familiar source material and unapologetic connective tissue to accompany Muschietti’s glossy (if not ground-breaking) two-part feature film reboot of ‘IT’, it all feels ambitious but stretched and more than occasionally contradictory. Like Noah Hawley’s recent Alien: Earth, there’s a feeling that everyone’s glad to be allowed access to a legendary toy-box and rubbing their hands together on the possibilities, but that they can’t quite work out how to smash things together to produce anything beyond the sheer noise of that collision. One wonders what another King-favourite, the often more restrained Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and currently working on a tv series of King’s Carrie) might have brought to the project, though even he went a little wild with The Fall of the House of Usher).
Despite the promotional imagery, Fuchs and friends have decided to keep his central clown car in reserve, with a Pennywise vibe permeating the early episodes, but with little sign of the clown himself (if the showrunners’ quote about ‘less being more until more is more‘ as we progress through the season, the mind boggles on what visuals may yet be in store). Imperative to the story that we know and are being further introduced to, the younger cast are great, especially Clara Stack as the troubled Lilly Bainbridge. So far there’s certainly enough mood to keep audiences watching and much talk of grander plans to expand the concept backwards and forwards along the timeline, but while there’s huge potential and gloss here, almost everything it does can be compared to something we’ve already seen, rather than being original… and it will need to pull things together its elements far more tightly in the remaining episodes of the season to fully satisfy and prove a worthwhile detour – to leave us truly stirred as well as shaken…
New episodes of Welcome to Derry are released on HBO Max every Sunday…
- Story8
- Acting9
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- Production Design/VFX9
