CAUTION: This article contains major spoilers for Castle Rock.
When the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil came out, it felt like the series fulfilled an unmet need. The show had its problems, even in its promising first year, but it did things differently than other live action superhero shows at the time. The series had something on its mind. It had production values and grimy visuals and creatively-staged fights. It was far from flawless, but its quick success made it seem like the herald of a new phase of genre television, one that aimed for something a little deeper, a little darker, and a little realer than what we’d had before.
Well maybe it’s time to send that herald back from whence it came. As I discussed on The Serial Fanatacist podcast, Castle Rock doesn’t directly borrow much, if anything, from Daredevil, but it’s part of the same wave of prestige-aping, navel-gazing genre shows whose reach far exceeds their grasp. While briefly novel, this sort of take on geek-approved material has worn out its welcome amid the onslaught of shows that know enough to gesticulate toward deeper themes and move the camera around in faux-portentous montages, but never really master the trade, let alone the depth of character or storytelling that could make those badges of seriousness legitimately meaningful.
The first season of Castle Rock builds those standard prestige T.V. tricks around the story of Henry Deaver, a young lawyer who returns to his seemingly cursed hometown. Henry’s return is spurred by the emergence of a nigh-mute captive at Shawshank Prison, dubbed “The Kid,” who appears to ask for Henry’s legal services. The season is centered around the mystery of Henry’s decades-old disappearance and reappearance, which happened to coincide with the death of his father, and questions about The Kid’s identity and history.
Castle Rock is based on the works of Stephen King, so it’s not hard to surmise that the supernatural is afoot in all of this. Credit where it’s due, Castle Rock delivers on that front. While the show devolves into cheap jump scares at times, it does a good job of crafting genuinely unnerving scenes and a chilling atmosphere when it wants to. Bill Skarsgård (who plays The Kid here and the title character in It) makes for a disturbing presence with his gaunt frame and hollowing stare. As a raw scare machine, Castle Rock does just fine.
Quick! Run! Before Tim Burton casts you in something!
The show also makes the most of its supernatural premise. Castle Rock seems to posit that the decades of misfortune and mysterious happenings in the titular town come from the fact it contains some kind of vergence point between various time periods and even dimensions, with a vague implication that the divine or the malevolent are at play. Castle Rock eventually reveals that both Henry and The Kid slipped through that vergence at different stages of their lives, which answers (or at least seems to answer) both of the season’s major mysteries.
Those reveals, however, take forever and are swamped with vague doublespeak, pointless hints, and extended efforts to teach the characters facts that the audience already knows. But the basic idea, opaque though it may be, is an intriguing one. The show squanders most of its potential there by spending far too long unwrapping the mystery box and stretching five episodes’ worth of incident out to a ten-episode season. But at times, the ambitiousness of the effort carries the day.
The same goes for Castle Rock’s themes. There’s power in the undertones of racism and abuse at the core the show’s first season. Following in the footsteps of the superlative Get Out, the show combines societal anxieties and supernatural ones to create something that can disturb you narratively and psychologically at once. As with Daredevil, there’s commendable efforts to say something in all of this, with commentary on the sclerosis and corruption in idealized small towns, racial prejudice and efforts to escape it, and the fickleness of human memory and the mind. But also like Daredevil, the show bites off more than it can chew and loses the plot in, well, the plot. What’s leftover is subsumed in a heap of faux-artsy dross that the creative team behind Castle Rock simply cannot pull off convincingly.
That’s a shame because the show’s cast is stacked. André Holland (of Moonlight fame) is often reduced to silently wandering around and looking puzzled, but still manages to breathe life and charm into the series’s lead character. Sissy Spacek steals the show as Henry’s adoptive mother, Ruth, who straddles the line between dementia and legitimate time-travel. Scott Glenn (who featured in Daredevil) does yeoman’s work as Alan Pangborn, Henry’s pseudo-stepdad, who creates tension in the family after he takes up with Ruth. Some of the season’s most compelling scenes occur when the show sets aside the mystery, horror, and science fiction elements that provide its genre bona fides, and instead just tells the story of this blended family struggling with a painful past and a degenerative illness.
And the occasional unearthing of a dead pet. You know, normally family stuff.
But that sort of focus is in short supply on Castle Rock, a show far more apt to bounce around and chase the threads of its dull central mystery than to spend any amount of time committedly moving the ball forward or letting the audience get to know its characters in depth. On the rare occasions when it does — in an outstanding early episode spotlighting Henry’s childhood friend Molly (Melanie Lynskey, who rises above the material), in a late vignette about a couple recovering from infidelity, and in a tour de force episode exploring Ruth’s fragmented experience — Castle Rock pulls off something special. Ruth’s episode, “The Queen”, in particular near single-handedly justifies this show’s existence.
That approach and its creative achievements, however, are in short supply. Instead, Castle Rock mostly gives itself over to amorphous, lumpily-structured episodes; long, tensionless sequences; and stock, overwritten dialogue. The average installment typically provokes some combination of checking your watch and scratching your head. The season lists lazily toward the resolution of its central whodunnit, without much purpose, direction, or payoff, let alone spark (aside from the occasional blip). And along the way, it’s apt to take detours up its own backside.
Some of this would be tolerable if the show weren’t so damn severe and serious. This is an “Important Show, Doing Serious Things,” and it damn well wants the audience to know it. The series tries to take refuge in artsy ambiguity, while coming off muddled and aimless. In trying to dress up the trappings of the genre in the cloak of prestige television, Castle Rock becomes plodding, joyless, and for the most part, still incapable of reaching the artistic and dramatic heights in seems to be groping for with all of its washed out color palette and ponderous voiceovers.
The first season of Castle Rock isn’t aiming to be Daredevil. If anything, it’s aiming to be a mix of Twin Peaks and True Detective, while lacking the genuinely outré qualities of the former and the quality of the latter. But it’s part and parcel with a wave of genre T.V. series that mimic the prestige television look, fill their lard-laden minutes with faux-profound monologues and tedious mysteries, and intend to make a grand artistic statement or two, while losing those vital elements like purpose, character, and tension that make those sorts of stories impactful. The first season of Castle Rock is mostly a slog, with a handful of transcendent bright spots that hint, like so many of the show’s heavy-handed portents, at the better show it might have been.
