An epidemic has given everyone in the world…the same voice. And they’re all hunting for the guy whose voice it is. “I mean, right now the first lady and Pee-wee Herman sound identical. That’s not right.”
I worried this would only be a cute excuse to make a full-cast show with only one actor. But creator Brian Barlow immediately proves he’s thought this through. There’s plenty of meat on the premise, and other fun too. I get a whiff of Jon Bois’s 17776, or 80s/90s movies like Groundhog Day: every character is already a little nutty outside of the premise. It makes things cozy.
A woman interviews her family about that time they thought she’d been sexually abused by a cult. This is a refreshingly un-lurid fiction about Satanic Panic.
As creator Emmet Cameron says in their intro, “We’re talking about the concept of people doing bad things to little kids, and the reality of people coercing little kids into forming false memories of trauma, which is also traumatic.” They put the gory details in the backstory, not the action, to make a more thoughtful commentary about how children look at the world, and how parents look at the world, and the terrible things people do out of fear, and how to live with them.
One of my favorite lines: “Whether he could understand us or not never seemed to make much of a difference. He just didn’t think daughters were for listening to.”
I didn’t finish this BBC one-off about discovering another habitable planet. But I loved the reveal of the other half of the premise, six minutes in. When writers talk about “craft,” that moment is the kind of thing I picture.
A historian catalogs mysterious artifacts apparently sent from alternate timelines. Each episode, the historian describes an artifact, then describes how its existence implies a particular change in history.
Part of the fun is figuring out the twist, so I’ll just say that one artifact is a British song for WWI troops, called “Eat Your Mushrooms, Kaiser Bill.”
With all of history to play with, the premise feels inexhaustible. The “mystery item” structure reminds me of the SCP Foundation, the fictional catalog of supernatural items, especially the SCP’s Daevite Empire.
The second season is even more SCP-like and much more scifi, imagining different ends of the world. No idea whether they'll find a third hook in season 3.
Wish I'd thought of those. But I have thought of my own premises, including “what if the Library of Babel had to serve patrons,” “what if Sharazade had to flee with the only copy of the Arabian Nights,” and “what if the mountain and the vulture from the fable met every thousand years and talked.” And some day soon you'll be able to hear them. Stay subscribed.