This show is quite the experience. A genre-bending extravaganza of history and Black existential horror, season 1 of this new HBO series recently wrapped up. Definitely something worth watching.
Tic, a young Black veteran recently returned home from Korea, goes on a trip in search of his missing father. Alongside his uncle George and a neighborhood girl named Leti, their travels take them to a mansion in Massachusetts that’s guarded by monsters and home to a secret order dealing in magic. This encounter sparks a series of mindbending adventures as Tic, Leti, and the others work to unravel the order’s secrets, especially their connection to Tic’s family history.
As I said, this show dives into a number of different genres. I don’t know too much about the book that serves as a jumping-off point for the story, but the series deals in a variety of horror conventions (monsters, ghosts, curses, body horror,) as well as multiple dimensions, time travel, and an Indiana Jones-style adventure through a booby-trapped cavern in search of an important artifact. And hand in hand with the supernatural elements, continually, are the horrors of the real world. Whether it’s a desperate race to get out of a sundown county with the local sheriff on their tail or the one Black house in a white neighborhood finding itself under siege, the show demonstrates that the stuff with the magic and the monsters might be more fantastical threats for our heroes to face, but their lives already included terrors aplenty. The iconic imagery ranges from Jackie Robinson taking on a monster to a character being haunted by a figure from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and important pieces of Black history like the Tulsa massacre, Black travel guides, and the murder of Emmett Till are included.
I would imagine thise series owes a big part of its existence to Get Out’s success, and sure enough, Jordan Peele is one of its executive producers. But I think the show stands on its own. It gets really deep into its own mythology, I enjoy how the history blends with the magic/horror/sci-fi stuff, and I think a TV show just stretches different muscles and is able to explore its characters in different ways. In light of that, I’ll refrain from comparing the two. Not everything works for me in Lovecraft Country – some of the female characters aren’t very well-served on the whole, and the show’s attempts at LGBTQ representation are pretty wanting for me – but it’s an engrossing series to watch, and there are a lot of things to appreciate about season 1.
You can feel HBO’s deep pockets in the production values. Everything looks really good, from the intricate production design to the CGI creatures. It’s all the more impressive because the ambitious narrative takes us to a lot of different places, and the mix of genres means that many episodes bring their own feel that’s distinct from the others. As such, there are numerous disparate locales to bring to life and multiple types of atmosphere to create, and the show succeeds with pretty much all of them.
The cast is uniformly good. This was my introduction to Jonathan Majors, who plays Tic, and he’s really strong as a young man trying to carry himself and those he cares about through a series of intense, nigh-impossible situations. I enjoyed Jurnee Smollett as Black Canary in Birds of Prey, so it’s cool to see her here in a very different role as Leti. The show also features Michael K. Williams (Omar!), Abbey Lee (I needed IMDb to figure out where I recognized her from – she played the Dag in Mad Max: Fury Road,) and Jamie Chung (Mulan from Once Upon a Time,) and Aujanue Ellis is great as Tic’s aunt Hippolyta. I want to single out a couple of cast members in particular. First, there’s Wunmi Mosaku as Leti’s sister Ruby. Mosaku first caught my eye in the second series of In the Flesh, and she turns in masterful work here. Second is Courtney B. Vance as Uncle George. I’ve seen Vance in a handful of things over the years, but I recognize him best from the short-lived series FlashForward (it wanted to be Lost so badly.) I get now that that show/role punched way below his weight class, because he’s just effortlessly good in this – I appreciate every minute he’s onscreen.
Warnings
Strong violence/gore (including racist violence and police brutality,) sexual content, language (including racial and homophobic slurs,) drinking/smoking, and strong thematic elements.
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