Stream It Or Skip It?

It’s amazing to us how often Stephen King’s novels are made and remade at this point. It seemed that the 1990 miniseries version of IT was a pretty well-received take on King’s novel about the murderous, shapeshifting clown Pennywise. But then, in 2017, Andy Muschietti made a gorier theatrical film based on the novel, and made a sequel two years later. Now, he’s going back to the early sixties to show how long Pennywise has been terrorizing the town of Derry.

Opening Shot: As The Music Man plays on a movie theater screen, we pan the audience until we reach the image of a boy who is far too old to have a pacifier sucking on one.

The Gist: Matty (Miles Ekhardt) is the kid with the pacifier; he has a very troubled home life and likes to hide out in the dark of the theater. As the song “Ya Got Trouble” plays, he’s chased out by an usher, but Ronnie (Amanda Christine), the daughter of the projectionist, helps keep him from the usher’s clutches.

Matty walks down a snowy, cold road out of his hometown of Derry, Maine, and is picked up by a family supposedly heading for Portland. But strange things happen in the car, and Matty disappears.

Four months later, in April of 1962, three of the kids Matty went to school with are still grappling with his disappearance. Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler) feels guilty that he needed to be bribed with candy in order to hang out with Matty on his birthday. His buddy Phil (Jack Molloy Legault) seems preoccupied with the secret project that’s going on at the nearby airbase; he thinks the Air Force has captured aliens. Lilly (Clara Stack) really connected with Matty; he even tried to kiss her as they watched fireworks from a hideout the boys went to.

Lilly then hears Matty’s voice coming through the drain of her bathtub, and two bloody fingers popping through. She tells Phil and Teddy, but they think she is still suffering from the industrial accident that killed her father and eventually sent her to a psychiatric hospital. But when Matty sees his own horrific vision, the three of them set off to figure out where Matty is, with the help of Ronnie, who also heard a voice in her plumbing.

In the meantime, Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) arrives at the base on a new assignment, having to deal with the usual racism he sees from enlisted who don’t want to salute a Black man. He’s a decorated pilot who is there to take test runs on a new bomber, the UB-52. The project is shrouded in secrecy, and he finds out how sensitive the project is when he’s attacked in the on-base room where he’s sleeping. And this is before his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige) and son Will (Blake Cameron James) arrive in Derry and move into their rented house.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? IT: Welcome To Derry is a prequel to Andy Muschietti’s IT films that starred Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise (not as much the 1990 miniseries starring Tim Curry). Skarsgård also plays the murderous clown in the series. In a lot of ways, though, Welcome To Derry feels more like Stranger Things than a horror film based on a Stephen King classic.

Our Take: There is certainly a lot of blood, gore, and grossness in IT: Welcome To Derry, but we’re not 100 percent sure what the story of this series actually is. Showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane and their writers have set up a story that’s as much space-age-era kitsch as it is about blood and horror. But there also seems to be about three or four stories going on at once, which we get the feeling will get connected at some point, but we’re not sure how long that will take.

In the meantime, we get a first episode where Hanlon gets an idea that what he’s in Derry to do is a high-risk, highly-sensitive operation. And then we get four 12-year-olds (and Phil’s little sister) wandering around town trying to find out what actually happened to their friend. We even get a hint of the presence of Pennywise, though we’re not sure how the disappearance of Matty and the presence of Pennywise are related.

None of it feels cohesive at this point, and by the end of the episode, we’re not even sure which characters are still alive or not. As kids disappear, we suspect that they’re sucked into the sewers like Matty was, but is Pennywise taking on their personas to trick Lilly and company, and are they actually alive or dead?

While the show looks great, and takes its early-’60s setting and deals with issues like racism, creeping suburbia and more, we’re just not sure if we’re in the mood to sit through eight episodes full of ambiguous scenes that are only there to stretch out the fates of the main characters to the point where viewers might lose interest.

Sex and Skin: There’s a scene in the car with the family that picks up Matty that could go in this category, even though it’s pretty disgusting to watch.

Parting Shot: Ronnie sees Lilly holding something that makes her gasp in horror.

Sleeper Star: Rudy Mancuso is Capt. Pauly Russo, who flew with Hanlon in Korea. Besides having his friend’s back, we’re curious to see what role Russo will have in the story going forward.

Most Pilot-y Line: Margie (Matilda Lawler) is supposed to be Lilly’s bestie, but she seems to be too preoccupied by her new glasses and getting in with the popular clique to be of any use as a character.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While we’re hoping that the various stories in IT: Welcome To Derry coalesce into something that will keep viewers on the edge of their couches, the scattershot pacing of the first episode gives us pause.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.