AMAZING STORIES Season One
Anthological excavation
UK/US Apple TV+, streaming now Showrunners Adam Horowitz,
Edward Kitsis
Cast Robert Forster, Hailey Kilgore, Dylan O’Brien, Austin Stowell
The original Amazing Stories brought the Amblin brand to the small screen when Steven Spielberg was in his ’80s pomp. It was an anthology show that never quite delivered on the boast of its title. This Apple revival proves to be just the same, coming across as a nostalgic simulacrum of middling television.
Opener “The Cellar” feels the most archaic in this Black Mirror age, the tale of a Tinder-obsessed millennial who time-travels to 1919 and falls in love. Indebted to the 1980 Christopher Reeve movie Somewhere In Time, it’s an anodyne insta-romance which fails to convey plausible human reactions that would make the premise more compelling.
“The Heat” is stronger, an urban ghost story lifted by a charismatic pair of leads – particularly Hailey Kilgore as Tuka, the young track star determined to solve her own death. Kilgore sells Tuka’s disbelief at her spectral situation and provides some credible emotional current.
“Dynoman And The Volt”, meanwhile, is a last hurrah for the late Robert Forster, cast here as a grandfather who receives superpowers from a gimcrack comic book ring. It’s sweet fluff, and as in many of these episodes the inciting phenomenon is left as so much unexplained woo-woo.
The story of a mother’s mysterious recovery from a six-year coma, “Signs Of Life” is an absorbing quasi-X-File, hooking you by teasing its secrets, while season closer “The Rift” (based on a 2017 comic) is the most classically Spielbergian, all time-lost WW2 pilots and black-shaded government operatives. It may echo elements of Close Encounters, but as in the stories that surround it the flair of the master is missing.
Nick Setchfield
Showrunners Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis are now at work on a pilot for a (liveaction) Beauty And The Beast prequel.