RIOTUS

Let me be up front right from the start, I didn’t enjoy watching this television show. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the modern IT films directed by Andy Muschietti, as I felt they were a bit too literal. Especially compared to older network television miniseries, since I saw that as a kid, and with Tim Curry as Pennywise, it locked itself in my consciousness in the right way to make it stick with me. It’s Tim Curry’s fault I don’t like clowns in real life to this day. Yet, with my ambivalence to the current take on the story that was a hit with audiences, I decided to take a chance on the new show IT: Welcome to Derry. Working off the changes to the timeline, the two films did this series is a prequel one that is trying to make IT into a universe, but also one that incorporates other characters from other Stephen King stories.

The pilot has a very familiar setup with a gang of children ending up interacting with an eldritch horror being that Pennywise is, as its evil poisons the town they live in. Taking place in the early 1960s, the setting is closer to the original novel, with a boy going missing and the other children taking up the cause to figure out what happened after they are all stricken with visions of terror because of their closeness or non-closeness to him. Poor Matty (Miles Ekhardt) is the kid no one cares about until he’s gone. With Hank Grogan, a local Black man who works at the movie theater, being the only person who showed him kindness. We’ll get back to this later, as it leads to some big problems

Clara Stack‘s Lily has an interesting charcter as a girl who suffered the tragedy of losing her father and becoming an outcast of the school populace and while liking Matty, feels like she should help this connects her with Terry (Mikkal Karim Fidler) and Phil (Jack Molloy Legault), two more geeky looking boys with Phil a burgeoning science fiction and comic book loving storyteller with his more reasonable and guilt ridden Jewish friend Terry. Feeling he has to do more. From here, you’re supposed to feel like Terry and Lilly are going to have an arc and a connection as they search for Matty. They end up meeting with Ronnie (Amanda Christine), daughter of Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), who worries about her father after Matty has gone missing, and you know her dad being Black means he’s the only suspect in the town.

Now, I’m sorry if this feels spoilery, but this is just the pilot, and things happen where the entire show changes focus to most new characters by the second episode. Just think of the first episode as the first kid in the raincoat from the first movie twice. Our real main characters and story hits once Air Force Officer and bomber pilot Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) moves to Derry with his partner Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso) to work on a secret mission. Struggling with a failed mission during the Korean War, Hanlon is determined to make up for it here. Moving his family, wife Charlotte (Taylor Paige), and son Will (Blake Cameron James), enter this lily white world with an uncomfortable darkness to it, especially being the only Black family in the nice part of town. This alone is a pretty decent setup, but there’s a lot more going on.

The hyper-violent gore of the deadly hauntings of Pennywise on the children is far from scary or terrifying; they end up just being disturbing visuals of torture that made me want to look away, not for fear but of pure disgust. The show continues to constantly up the ante on these visuals as the series goes on at the cost of stakes and empathy for the characters in the story. At times, it just feels like I’m watching story beats just to get to the next violent horror scene. All this is twisted along with trying to tell this story about race in a small American town as well, and that’s really when it starts falling apart.

The show has Hank being blamed for murders that he clearly didn’t commit. This drives Ronnie to do whatever she can to save him. This is one of the many ways the issue of race, racism, and the more unspoken nature of white supremacy in the north is injected into this story that doesn’t work and clouds the narrative the show is trying to tell. She ends up having a conflict with Lilly, who also has a weird conflict with the authorities of the town. Hank’s dilemma is set up as Pennywise’s darkness is causing Derry’s inherent racism and intolerance to boil over slowly as the show goes on. Charlotte is taking on a civil rights fight for Hank, along with subtle things with Will, as his blerdness conflicts with others’ views of him constantly. I do like how Will and Ronnie become friends and the growing bond between the two. I didn’t see in the episodes I watched, but the Hanlon family never goes to the Black side of town, but I hope they, or at least Charlotte and Will, go to tie that storyline together in some way.

I feel the biggest culprit of this is adding the character of Dick Hallorann from The Shining into this show, tying together these two stories in a way that just makes you think up questions every time he’s on the screen. Chris Chalk gives an outstanding performance as a younger version of this man, in the military, and using his gifts to help them with their mission. That part, though, his using his “shining” to help the military do something terrible, doesn’t square with what we know of the character in the other places we know the character. It feels the show, at times, cares more about directly connecting these little easter eggs that King put into his novels into full-fledged plot points to see. This at times feels like message board fanfiction that cares a little too much about connecting the dots than about telling a good story.

There are some good things about this show. It looks very good, the same level as the films, yet it’s a TV show. All the HBO/WBD shine and polish are here. The visual effects are very well done and, for my tastes, a little too well done. The child actors do very well in this show, with so much of the show focused on them. They all give good performances. The sound is really good with a solid mix that helps with building the tension and having gross things sound very much as gross as they look. Sets and production design are all top-tier. Hair, makeup, and costumes are all perfect from what I can tell—all this to stretch out a story further than it ever needed to be.

I don’t think IT: Welcome to Derry serves the original story well, and I don’t think it serves Stephen King well either. This show feels like it wants to make the modern adaptation more of these new folks’ thing while still coasting off of King’s stuff. I think this show will entertain people, but I feel it will feel like empty calories the more they think about it. I know I’m not the audience for this show, but I do believe those it is meant for deserve a bit better. I also think people need to stop injecting Black people’s plight in the United States, especially during the mid-20^th century, as story umami flavoring to make their weak shows and films into something more than it is. It’s disrespectful to these real things to just make it some part of an evil alien clown terrorizing some white folks in Maine.