It: Welcome to Derry Review | Sometimes It Comes Back

It can be hard to review a show as densely packed and closely guarded as the first season of It: Welcome to Derry, an offshoot of filmmaker and series co-creator Andy Muschietti’s two-part big screen adaptation of author Stephen King’s grandest literary opus next to The Stand and The Dark Tower saga. With over 1,100 pages of material to work from, Andy and Barabara Muschietti and fellow creator Jason Fuchs have plenty of material to tackle that they didn’t get around to the first time, and are awarded the freedom to explore new avenues of their own in the process. And while some of It: Welcome to Derry is very good and it starts off strong, the overall viability of this show as a planned trilogy of different period pieces remains hazy.

For starters, HBO has only provided press with the first five instalments of this eight episode arc, presumably to keep spoilers from leaking out. That’s perfectly understandable for viewers and creatives who want to keep the secrets of It: Welcome to Derry out of sight for as long as possible. The down side is that I can only grade what I’ve seen, and I’m unable to speculate where things might be heading. And in terms of talking about what I’ve seen, there are a list of spoilers that I’ve been asked to avoid discussing until the show has aired.

It: Welcome to Derry starts off strong with a jaw dropping opening episode, directed by Muschietti… that I am not really allowed to talk about. When you see it, you’ll know why the powers that be are being so precious with it, but when a writer is more or less told that they can’t discuss the roles of the young actors that make up so much of this early 60s set prologue in the titular, mysteriously plagued town, that limits what can be said about the overall set up of the show. 

I’m actually allowed to say more about the show’s second, equally good episode, which frames Derry as a place where the U.S. military is staging a secret operation to uncover and harness a strange, dark power that has been hidden in the town for centuries. Into this town arrives the Hanlon family, including the eventual father and grandfather of one of the film’s main characters, Mike Hanlon, whose recollections of Derry’s history in King’s novel provide the inspiration for this series. 

Leroy (Jovan Adepo) is an unflappable Air Force pilot trying to navigate being black in the military during the height of the civil rights movement. Leroy and close colleague Pauly (Rudy Mancuso) are charged by General Francis Shaw (James Remar) to assist clairvoyant soldier Dick Halloran (Perry Mason standout Chris Chalk) in locating the source of the energy. Leroy’s wife, Charlotte (Taylour Paige), was a big part of the movement back when they lived in the South, and is naturally suspicious of the strange goings-on around town. And young Will (Blake Cameron) falls in with a group of kids who’re probing the disappearances of other young people, and dealing with adults who seemingly don’t want to listen to or believe their concerns.

The set-up for It: Welcome to Derry shows Muschietti and company very much aiming to create the next Stranger Things, now that Netflix’s juggernaut is due to wrap up its primary form later this year. There’s a calculation and obviousness to the approach that can’t be denied or understated. While viewers shouldn’t hold their breath for Bill Skarsgård’s wickedly evil clown Pennywise to appear immediately (because it’s not that kind of show, despite callbacks to the films and other notable King properties aplenty), there are a good deal of spooky set pieces (including a memorable bit in a supermarket) and ominous foreshadowings to keep things chugging along at an entertaining rate at the outset. The show also wrestles with historical weight by placing visible minorities and the cold war at the centre of the evil maelstrom, and coaxing out themes of racial profiling (via the Hanlon family’s struggles, a look into the area’s indigenous history, and the depiction of a town scapegoat, played nicely by Stephen Rider) that arise naturally and unforced. It: Welcome to Derry isn’t big on subtlety, but at least it’s keeps all of its metaphorical leanings on a straight path.

But after establishing some nice groundwork and an unpredictable tone across the first two episodes, It: Welcome to Derry hits a noticeable rough patch after that. The third episode – a staggering drop in terms of quality and content from the first two – underlines the fact that It: Welcome to Derry is only marginally scary at the best of times, which is rather damning for a series that needs to constantly keep pulses racing in a bid to make them all come back for more. The third episode of It: Welcome to Derry is so cheesy, hokey, and profoundly un-scary during its big climax that it makes the recent Goosebumps movies look like the first name in terror. It is, without question, an awful episode, one that nearly kills the whole vibe of the show dead before it can ever settle into a confident stride.

Things rebound somewhat with the last two episodes I was able to preview before press time. Senses of dread and unease once again develop as the evil presence grows nearer to the characters, but this is also the point where the writers and directors decide to dump a bunch of lugubrious backstory and plot points on the viewer without parceling them out in a more organic matter. Episodes four and five are dense in terms of the storytelling, and while the fifth is the best of the bunch next to the first (which I also can’t talk about for similar reasons), there’s so much going on by that point that I still remain unsure what to make of all this. It: Welcome to Derry ends up having too many characters and too many subplots to keep adequate track of, and there’s a distinct fear that the show has taken on more than it can hold.

Granted, It: Welcome to Derry is the first of a planned trilogy of series, with future instalments slated to go back even further in time to 1935 and 1908. All of this exposition sounds like it has to come out at some point, but the showrunners don’t find a workable balance between delivering genre scares, teen based adventure, and dense lore. A lot of this sounds good, but the way it’s delivered is less than ideal.  I’ll stick around for the remainder of this first season, and maybe take a peek at how any future arcs unfold, but the uneasy pacing and that one awful episode almost out of the gate make me skeptical. I might return to this review once the series has aired in full to hopefully be proven wrong, but as it stands, I have to call it as I see it.

It: Welcome to Derry premieres with its first episode on Sunday, October 26th at 9:00pm EST on Crave in Canada and HBO elsewhere, with new episodes airing until December 14.