Lovecraft Country

Green has shown a gift for making the worst of our nation’s history into the staging ground for a conversation about the totality of its present. That’s on offer here, as well, but will become clearer as and if “Lovecraft Country” figures out the kind of show it wants to be. Surreality is a way to arrive at a deeper meaning, perhaps, but it requires crisply drawn characters to bring us through.

The series can also feel overheated, over-motivated, muddled and unsubtle, and not just because every single white character is trouble, if not implausibly so, on a scale from casually clueless to actively evil. Its emotional volume has a way of drowning out its humor.

I respect their ambition, and hope the series finds its footing. Right now, they're skewering Lovecraft's beliefs but can't compete with his singular horror vision. They're better people making worse art.

The show’s script is weighed down by historical annotations; characters refer to themselves and others using the nomenclature of the time (Negro, white) instead of the unqualified pronouns—“we,” “us,” “them”—of actual talk. Innuendo, a staple of melodrama, and a mode in which racialized language thrives, is missing. Neither this nor the show’s cartoonish whites—as viral videos have shown, racists turn cartoonish in the light—would be so distracting if they didn’t deprive mesmerizing talents of their room to work. ... In “Lovecraft Country,” there are revelations but seldom awe.

It’s a bold, heady venture with ambitions as grand as its creatures. Yet at least in its initial installments, it’s an effort routinely undercut by irritatingly sloppy storytelling. That Lovecraft Country is often an overstuffed narrative mess is made all the more frustrating by the fact that its debut episode is an expertly crafted table-settler for a rich saga to come.

Surreal and tonally muddled, this stylish gore-saturated series is capable of provoking screams and laughs and eye-rolls within the same scenes. [17 - 30 Aug 2020, p.11]

Racial horror is most effective when the central characters feel rich and fleshed-out, when audiences are invested in them not just out of implied moral obligation. For Lovecraft Country to simply flip the usual script with new creatures, then, isn’t enough. The series needs to double down on its most spirited scenes.