I have a pet theory that horror, as a genre, is an awkward fit for television. The tension necessary for effective scares is difficult to maintain over several hours; the mystery that creates suspense is hard to square with building characters and worlds through exposition. Auteurs like Mike Flanagan and Ryan Murphy are exceptions that make the rule โ and even Murphyโs influential anthology โAmerican Horror Storyโ has faded from the cultural high water mark of its first three seasons. โStranger Thingsโ may have been an era-defining hit for Netflix, but the Duffer Brothersโ breakout show is more of a youthful adventure with accents of horror.
The Duffers themselves decamp Netflix for Paramount next month, but this week sees the debut of their first non-โStranger Thingsโ production for the service. (Science fiction series โThe Boroughsโ will follow in May.) Created and showrun by Haley Z. Boston, โSomething Very Bad Is Going to Happenโ initially confirmed my prior suspicions. For a full half of its eight-episode season, โSomething Very Badโ has to conceal whatโs really going on with upstate wedding between psychology grad student Rachel (Camila Morrone) and sweet, milquetoast Nicky (Adam DiMarco) at his familyโs creepy, snowbound country cabin. Ultimately, I quite liked the show โSomething Very Badโ becomes once Boston and her team put their cards on the table. But that show is different enough from the initial presentation, and takes long enough to reveal itself, that Iโm not convinced โSomething Very Badโ is best served by its chosen format.
The series does revel in its bait-and-switch, as is its right. The already anxious Rachel, who lost her mother as an infant and is estranged from her dad, has a bad feeling about her nuptials in five days. You canโt blame her: she hasnโt even met Nickyโs family before, let alone been to the house where theyโre hosting the celebration. Nor does the Cunningham clan make a strong first impression. Patriarch Borisโ (Ted Levine) idea of stress relief is turning animal corpses into taxidermy. His wife Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) swans around the house making cryptic statements in her nightgown. Nickyโs sister Portia (Gus Birney) seems intent on hijacking the wedding, spearheading everything from food to decor. His brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch) just seems like a dick โ and Julesโ wife Nell (Karla Crome) also happens to be Nickyโs ex.
Rachel understandably starts to worry the Cunninghams are in some kind of conspiracy against her. They keep whispering in hushed tones when they think sheโs out of earshot. Her wedding dress goes missing, and Portiaโs all too eager to swap it out for Victoriaโs old one. Thereโs a weird family portrait with a blank spot for Nickyโs future wife. And given the prevalence of malevolent, predatory rich people in pop culture โ plus the subgenre of nightmare in-laws, as seen lately in โLove Storyโ and โReady or Not 2โ โย itโs not a great sign that the familyโs humble country retreat turns out to be a sprawling property. On the other hand, all these omens popping up so early in the season is an indication there are further twists to come.
The all-female directing team (led by producing director Weronika Tofilska, who helms half the season) take evident pleasure in effectively ramping up Rachelโs unease with jump scares and desolate, depopulated landscapes. But it also takes an entire episode for the (sort of) happy couple to arrive at the cabin, and several more for the true premise and themes of โSomething Very Badโ to reveal themselves. I am, of course, forbidden from disclosing what those are โ but I can say theyโre accompanied by a tonal shift thatโs more wryly comedic and delightfully deadpan than what comes before.
Side B of โSomething Very Badโ also shifts the focus to the nature of Rachel and Nickyโs relationship. Initially, Morrone and DiMarcoโs performances hew closely to horror archetypes: her the panicked, presumably final girl; him the clueless, potentially gaslighting dope who acknowledges her concerns without taking them seriously. But the questions then raised about whether the pair is right for each other, and what expectations about marriage theyโve inherited from their respective parents, call for retroactively turning them into individuals with a complex dynamic thereโs not enough time to fully shade in.
Television has proven an ideal vehicle for putting romantic bonds under the microscope. (Here I must point, once again, to โLove Storyโ โย a commercial and creative success.) In the name of obscuring the real deal with the Cunninghams, as well as Rachel herself, โSomething Very Badโ has to compress the very undertaking itโs so suited for into a too-narrow space. Sometimes, itโs hard to tell the refreshingly wacky tone of the back half from straight-up messy storytelling. Suddenly Portia has the ability to communicate with the dead, just when Rachel could use a medium? OK! The chaos is still an acceptable price to pay for Birneyโs expertly offputting performance, a shrill mania that gets increasingly comic over time.
โSomething Very Badโ ends up hinging on whether Rachel and Nicky are truly convinced that theyโre soulmates. Itโs an intriguing question, one that the show pokes at by unpacking their origin story of an airport meet-cute. But the show waits so long to set up these stakes I found myself preoccupied by other mysteries, like: Would this work better as a movie, compressing all the events into a single weekend? Or a slightly shorter series that dispensed with the preamble, but gave the real meat of the story more room to breathe? I donโt have the answers. I just enjoyed parts of โSomething Very Badโ enough to crave a structure that was better suited to showing them off.
All eight episodes of โSomething Very Bad Is Going to Happenโ are now streaming on Netflix.
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