Tales From the Loop

It’s an uncommonly rich series, one with a tremendous amount of heart, and one that, if you’re willing to accept it, might even touch your own.

Halpern writes every episode of this first season and has a gift for keying into the eerie beauty of Stålenhag's visuals and finding stories that match their disquieting melancholy. "Loop" sets the tone.

It’s a moving, determinedly solemn adaptation of Swedish author/artist Simon Stålenhag’s lavishly illustrated book.

“Tales from the Loop” is so low-key it stands out simply by not standing out. There are no mega-explosions apparent, no eye-popping special effects or gore celebrations. It offers meditations on man in a modern world beyond easy control. Which hardly seems like science fiction.

Episodic anthologies often struggle to replicate audience expectancy; that drive you feel to see what happens next. The sci-fi genre often uses extraordinary outward events to look inward. “Tales From the Loop” does the latter very well, but still struggles with the former; while it’s nice not to feel like you have to keep watching to solve the mystery, more urgency could help the series carry a more lasting impact. There’s a lot of beauty in this loop, for those curious enough to seek it out.

As themes go, “life goes on” would surely rank as one of the least profound, but Tales from the Loop continues to offer details that resonate.

While it can’t maintain the magnetically-charged voltage of its initial sprint, it can be quite enchanting.

I wish Tales From the Loop would press it further. I certainly don’t think it’s a bad show because it doesn’t, but you can feel the show tentatively holding back for fear of scaring you away with sci-fi jargon and technobabble which are frequently used in other anthology shows of this ilk.

Nobody would accuse Tales from the Loop of being gripping, but it has other qualities, rare in a frenetic era: it is thoughtful, patient, and unafraid to leave its Big Questions open-ended. This is slow television for slow days, and for all the viewers who switch off after 10 minutes worried they are slipping into a coma, there will be others for whom this is a curious joy.

The drama dwells on concerns that are very human in origin, sometimes using sci-fi elements as a catalyst and sometimes barely integrating them at all.

It plays like a TV series inspired by paintings. Striking to look at — pretty. Static. Austere. Slow.

Tales From The Loop feels like something that should be hung on a wall, admired and interpreted rather than a show that a viewer can lean in, watch, and get involved in.

With a set-up promising untold wonders, it’s a bit of a letdown when the three hour-long episodes made available for review tread such familiar territory.