TV Review - Lovecraft Country - Season 1

 

Who to blame for Lovecraft Country? 

To be clear, the show isn't bad. In fact, at times, its exhilarating how well it blends racial oppression in 50s America with horror stories from the last century. But as a loose anthology, it lives and dies by how well it riffs on each episode's old school horror.

The spine of the show's story, holding its many and varied episodes together, follows war vet Atticus (Jonathan Majors), who returns home to 1950s U.S. of A. after serving in South Korea. Almost immediately, he goes in search of his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams) with the help of his childhood friend, Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), and his uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance). Between them, Majors, Smollett, Williams and Vance have more charisma than should be healthy for a person - but it's all in service to a sub-Lost mystery that drags us, again and again, away from each episodes principal horror story. It gets so bad that you end up resenting the core cast as the camera cuts back to them trying to decipher another book, chant or hieroglyph.

But when the show works, good God does it work. In its ingenious third episode, it subverts the traditional haunted house story by having the inhabitants in greater danger from those made of flesh and blood, harassing them from without, than by the tortured souls haunting them from within. In its darkly funny fifth episode, it takes a queasily graphic approach to body horror, whilst wryly detailing a strange kind of code switching. But to get to these episodes, you have to wade through a shambolic story about magicians - played by the Ku Klux Klan, but with sparkly magic - and a tonally jarring Indiana Jones adventure. 

So who's to blame for Lovecraft Country's ramshackle nature? It'd be easy to put it all on wunderkind producer JJ Abrams, who knows how to set up a show, but is less able to see a story through to the end (see: Lost, Alias, Westworld, Fringe, and the list goes on). But given that there are more than twenty producers on LC, it's hard not to imagine that that's an awful lot of people, of which more than a few must have been pulling in a different direction to everyone else...

6.5/10