Expansion goes awry in prequel series It: Welcome to Derry. Set 27 years before the Losers Club first confronted the child-eating trans-dimensional entity, and 54 years before they’d return as adults to destroy it for good, not much has changed in Stephen King‘s fictional Maine town. To bypass the prequel’s narrative constraints, developed by Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, along with showrunners Brad Caleb Kane and Jason Fuchs attempt to deepen the lore by digging further into the past and King’s other literary works. It makes for a wildly uneven mashup of familiar retread and engaging remix of King’s works.
The series begins with the arrival of the Hanlon family; patriarch Leroy (Overlord‘s Jovan Adepo) has just relocated his wife Charlotte (The Toxic Avenger‘s Taylour Paige) and son Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James) to the suburbs for a top-secret military assignment overseen by General Shaw (James Remar). That keeps the grownups busy and distracted while strange happenings in town lead Will to connect with fellow outcast kids like Lilly (Clara Stack) and Ronnie (Amanda Christine) as they discover they’re all being tormented by the same sinister presence.
Photograph by Brooke Palmer/HBO
A protracted opening sequence, which sees a troubled kid suffer a rather gnarly encounter with the eponymous shapeshifter, lays bare one of the series’ most glaring problems straightaway: shock value takes precedence over dread and genuine scares. The first five episodes screened for critics seek to build anticipation for Bill Skarsgård‘s Pennywise, relegating the figure to background scares as it chooses grand guignol-style tactics to terrorize the kids in 1962. While the imagery can be potent, Derry mistakes jump scares and fetal bat babies for tension and fear. Not helping is that the kids, at least so far, are stuck following a similar formulaic path as the Losers Club as they try to rally past their fears to solve a series of missing kids cases while being disregarded by adults.
Stack and Christine are standouts among the young cast, with Stack especially effective and heartbreaking as the brave but bullied girl still reeling from tragedy. Adepo and Paige earn easy rooting interest as the level-headed newcomers with strong moral centers, a must in a town like Derry, but are given far less to do the more Derry piles on the lore and subplots. But it’s telling that the strongest character work and story risks hail from Chris Chalk‘s Dick Hallorann, years before the telepathic cook would step foot in the Overlook. Hallorann is indeed a character briefly mentioned in King’s epic novel, so his inclusion isn’t abnormal, but Kane and Fuchs’ writing team finds rather fascinating ways to incorporate the characters’ unique skillset here. Chalk’s ability to externalize Hallorann’s rather internal psychology and the toll of his powers makes for one of the most compelling aspects of the prequel series.
Chris Chalk as Dick Hallorann. Photograph by Brooke Palmer/HBO
The Shawshank Prison also gets folded in with the turbulent race relations of the ’60s setting, along with no shortage of references and easter eggs lifted straight out of King’s works. Constant Readers might have fun matching the painstakingly recreated set pieces that feel lifted straight out of Muschietti’s films, untouched by time, to character names and details from the novel’s pages. But the more the series wears on, the more it becomes clear that those connections have become a narrative crutch.
Welcome to Derry introduces a lot of great ideas and set pieces that show glimpses of greatness. The right ingredients are all there for something special. The cast is as tremendous as the production design, and the ’60s setting inspires new angles to exposing the rot beneath Derry’s Norman Rockwell-like facade. But there’s an almost empty artifice to it all, just fresh window dressing on a familiar story we’ve already seen and know how it ends, especially as the horror takes its time to escalate. The characters go far to retain interest, but so far, Welcome to Derry struggles to say anything with conviction, and we’ve seen Pennywise’s freakshow act already before.
The eight-episode series premieres Sunday, October 26, at 9pm ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max. New episodes will debut weekly leading up to the season finale on December 14.