Derry

If you appreciate a good understatement, Kimberly Guerrero’s Rose utters a real doozy partway through the fourth episode of HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry.

Rose, local small businesswoman and member of the Indigenous tribe protecting secrets about the titular Maine town, explains to newcomer Charlotte Hanlon (Taylour Paige), “Derry is a beautiful place, but things do happen from time to time. Never a bad idea to keep the people you love close.”

That’s about as close as any Derry resident can get to saying, “Come for our open-minded New England values, stay because you were butchered by a killer clown.” Forgetting Derry’s communal traumas is as much a part of the town’s firmament as the scenic canals, the nearby Air Force base where Charlotte’s hubby Leroy (Jovan Adepo) has been newly posted, and the dilapidated house at 29 Neibolt Street. This forgetfulness, which has a supernatural origin, abets the monstrous tragedies that befall Derry every 27 years and it fuels It: Welcome to Derry, a bluntly effective frightfest that too often gets its scares through repetitiveness rather than creativity.

Developed by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, It: Welcome to Derry is a companion series/prequel to Muschietti’s two-part film adaptation, which translated Stephen King‘s epic novel by removing all of its structural and thematic complexity. Instead of weaving a nuanced interlocking story built on nostalgia and memory, Muschietti delivered a decent period-set childhood romp that wasn’t bad, and then an autonomous present-day sequel saddled with nearly all the book’s narrative flaws, somehow made even worse.

The book, probably still my pick as King’s scariest novel if not his best, is overpacked with additional flashbacks and interludes that could have been fodder for multiple seasons of television. What’s most peculiar about It: Welcomes to Derry, then, is that the creators have opted to basically replicate the core plot of the movie/book and fill in the gaps with what feel like third-tier King devices and clichés.

I sometimes liked It: Welcome to Derry, but mostly because it reminded me of a thing I love, not because of much that it actually does.

The body of the series begins in April of 1962, four months after one of those “things” that happen in Derry from time to time. The “thing” is shown in a deliciously gory prologue that relies heavily on the film version of The Music Man, a movie released in June 1962, one of many things about the timeline that you don’t want to think too hard about. Suffice it to say, without spoiling, that children aren’t safe in Derry.

It’s a less-than-ideal place, then, for Charlotte and Leroy, a Korean War hero (another temporal detail that doesn’t entirely work) with a unique condition, to bring their son Will (Blake Cameron James). Leroy soon meets the base’s commanding officer, General Shaw (James Remar), and fellow airman Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), who has his own unique condition that’s already well known to fans of The Shining. A Black family’s move into a traditionally white space made for an effective set-up in the intriguing, if slightly heavy-handed Amazon horror anthology Them, but here the racial undertones are limited to some tossed-off dialogue, playing second fiddle to what’s happening on the base and in surrounding environs.

The main story is a straight-up rehash of the Losers Club from the book, the juvenile adventures that so thoroughly inspired Stranger Things. Mike gets to Derry High School and soon meets an assortment of outcasts, including Lilly (Clara Stack), who spent time at the Juniper Hill Asylum after the untimely death of her father; Ronnie (Amanda Christine), whose father is the projectionist at the local movie theater; Lilly’s bestie Margie (Matilda Lawler), desperate to be popular and prone to saying things like “ginchy.” 

Awful things are transpiring in Derry and some of the outcasts soon begin poking around and, because kids have open imaginations, they’re relatively chill when voices start coming out of the sewers and fingers start poking up from the bathroom drains.

“It sounds impossible, but maybe it’s just improbable,” observes Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler), another outcast with a very familiar last name.

Get ready for ill-fated kids, eerily floating red balloons and a familiar clown named Pennywise. (Though Bill Skarsgard is prominent in the cast and even a credited executive producer, Pennywise doesn’t play a huge role in the five episodes sent to critics.)

But mostly, get ready for references and Easter eggs aplenty. It takes little Stephen King literacy to know that a character named “Hanlon” will someday be connected to Mike or to understand what it means to have Dick Hallorann as part of the story, and even less to point knowingly at a prison bus labeled “Shawshank.” If you’re the sort of Stephen King fan who sees the name “Bowers” — the local police chief — and instantly thinks “Henry” or hears a mention of Juniper Hill and is reminded of a half-dozen novels and stories, you’re on the series’ general wavelength.

(Except if you’re able to make those mid-grade Stephen King leaps, you’re probably the sort of fan who’s frustrated that the Muschietti timeline has to be treated as “definitive,” and for whom the original Losers Club storyline will always take place in 1957-58 and not 1988-1989 like in the film. That makes it even more confusing and, honestly, annoying that Welcome to Derry reboots the Losers Club story here in 1962. Will Hanlon having gone through a near-identical adventure to the one his son goes through 27 years later fits with King’s symmetry, but if you prefer the timeline from the books, the son’s adventure actually comes five years before the father’s adventure and everything becomes a mess.)

Say what you will about the payoffs delivered by Hulu’s Castle Rock — I thought both seasons set things up intriguingly, but couldn’t match their early aspirations — but that attempt to build an original series around a fictionalized Maine town honored the obsession of Stephen King fans and tried to carve new pathways through his work. I found myself frequently scratching my head about why the Welcome to Derry creators thought the only way to approach this story anew was to do the same thing over again, or to pipe in a folkloric Indigenous backdrop that deserved to be treated with far more commitment and authenticity.

The book is about primal insecurities and relatable fears, explored through the lens of classic horror tropes. The series says it’s about those things, but the lip-service references to the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War fail to approach the depth necessary to push past frightening-in-a-somewhat-silly-way to actually terrifying.

If you can ignore the familiarity, it’s easy to enjoy the Losers Club story, which has at least been extremely well-cast. James has an earnest charm, Christine a solid fierceness and Fidler a relatable fragility. Lawler, the best known of the young actors thanks to her breakout work in Station Eleven, brings welcome awkward humor, while Stack, with the series’ most complex character, conveys an uneasy grasp on sanity that the rest of the show isn’t really prepared to deal with.

From the adult cast, only Chalk, haunted in a way that’s instantly recognizable if you know the character’s origins and destination in the King-verse, has the gravity necessary to make up for how anemic the military story is. 

I can’t quite tell you, for reasons of both uncertainty and secrecy, what Madeleine Stowe is doing here, but even in a small role it’s a pleasure to see this underutilized actress. Paige, Adepo and Remar are among the actors whom I’ve liked in other things, but are so far squandered here.

Muschietti and the series’ subsequent directors may not develop any set pieces of substantive or psychologically rich horror, but there are stretches that are gross or fun or grossly fun — including the opening scene with the Music Man backdrop, a memorably grotesque and paranoid trip to the supermarket and one sequence best avoided by anybody with a phobia related to eyes. A playfully Amblin-esque scene involving bicycles in a cemetery offers an adrenaline rush, even if the effects reminded me of the Haunted Mansion Disney theme park attraction.

It’s telling that my favorite part of It: Welcome to Derry is the opening credit sequence, set against the childishly unsettling chestnut “A Smile and a Ribbon.” A series of Rockwell-esque, deceptively chipper images of small-town perfection are interrupted by subterranean nightmares. The credit sequence points to a satirical exploration of America’s transition from the assimilationist 1950s into the tumult of the 1960s, a piece of the book that the films lost in the fumbled timelines and that the series isn’t, thus far, clever enough to handle.

The message basically seems to be “Derry is a beautiful place, but things do happen from time to time.” You’ve probably heard that wisdom before, just like you’ve seen nearly everything in It: Welcome to Derry before.