You’ve never had to wait all that long for Hollywood to adapt another one of Stephen King’s tales, but the past couple of years have felt unusually flush with films and series based on the prolific author’s work. Some of the recent projects, like Carrie, Children of the Corn, and ’Salem’s Lot were duds that couldn’t re-create the terrifying magic that made earlier adaptations of those stories horror classics. But others, like The Life of Chuck and The Long Walk, were (for the most part) critical hits that reminded audiences how powerful King’s narratives could be in the right filmmakers’ hands.
This new wave of King adaptations was jumpstarted by Warner Bros. Discovery’s pair of relatively recent It features that did a tremendous job of making the classic story of kids battling an eldritch monster feel fresh. HBO’s new It: Welcome to Derry prequel series has potential; you can almost see how an It prequel digging into Pennywise’s past could make for a fascinating expansion on this chunk of King’s oeuvre. But rather than fleshing out Derry’s history with exciting and disturbing new details, the show mostly rehashes the original It’s beats with a lower production budget that makes everything feel too chintzy to be scary.
This might not be such a huge issue if Welcome to Derry’s story were more engaging, if its performances were stronger, or if its moments of horror were actually scary. But the most alarming thing about this show is how long it takes for the killer clown to show up and get down to business.
Set a few decades before the events of It, Welcome to Derry zooms in on the fictional Maine town during the thick of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1962, life in Derry is as quiet as it is simple for the city’s overwhelmingly white population. Nuclear families are the norm and no one really thinks to wonder why the military has recently spun up a secretive base nearby.
Though Derry’s population of Indigenous people has long since been displaced, it’s easy for white residents to convince themselves that racism doesn’t exist in the town because local projectionist Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) is a Black man. It’s also easy for many of Derry’s residents to forget how many children have disappeared under mysterious and inexplicable circumstances over the years.
But when a young boy vanishes after leaving the movie theater one evening, the people of Derry are quick to place blame on Hank and assume that he’s done something nefarious to the kid. Other local kids, like Hank’s daughter Ronnie (Amanda Christine) and her classmate Lilly (Clara Stack), know that the accused man is innocent. But they also know that no one will believe them if they try to explain the otherworldly presence they have identified as the real danger.
After Welcome to Derry first gives you a glimpse of one of the many forms Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård, who also executive produces) takes on to scare people, it becomes very clear that showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane are not all that interested in telling a story that feels materially different from the original It’s. Each of the show’s young characters has unnerving encounters with the monster long before they learn its name, what it wants, or how it loves to kill kids. Being hunted by Pennywise is new to all of them, but if you’ve read King’s novel or seen any of its adaptations, you can easily see how many of Welcome to Derry’s beats are cribbed from the recent It movies.
The monster whispers to the kids from bathroom sinks and pops up around town disguised as adults who appear normal until they start smiling with deranged expressions on their faces. What does feel a bit distinct here is the way Pennywise actually manages to kill quite a few children who initially seem poised to become Welcome to Derry’s central characters. But those surprises quickly give way to a by-the-numbers plot that feels overly concerned with spelling out what’s going on in exhaustive detail.
The show struggles to maintain any real sense of suspense as it shifts focus between its proto-Losers Club and adult characters like Air Force Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige), and General Shaw (James Remar). As transplants new to Derry, all of them can sense that there is something deeply strange about the town and the way long-term residents tend to behave toward outsiders. You can feel the show trying to use its historical setting to explore the ways in which Pennywise’s presence could make life uniquely dangerous for people of color unlucky enough to wind up living in Derry.
Image: HBO
At times, that framing (and a handful of references to DC’s comics) makes it seem like HBO intended for Welcome to Derry to unfold similarly to its Watchmen series. But compared to Watchmen, this prequel’s social commentary regarding racism is relatively thin, and it begins to feel somewhat hollow once the show starts trying to riff on some of the tropes that shaped King’s Pet Sematary.
As Welcome to Derry introduces supporting characters like a younger version of The Shining’s psychic chef Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), and name-drops locations like the Shawshank prison, you get the sense that HBO might see the series as the beginning of a new franchise. Those details have a way of making the show feel like a testing ground for an interconnected universe of King adaptations. It would all be much more interesting if Welcome to Derry didn’t share so much of its narrative DNA with Stranger Things and if the show’s horror set pieces were a bit more visually inspired. But more often than not, the series’ scares feel rushed out of necessity and the skew more gory than truly frightening, and it is sometimes hard to get a sense of who Welcome to Derry’s target audience is.
By the time that Pennywise shows up in his signature clown guise, Welcome to Derry has already long since telegraphed how it’s all going to end and exhausted its ability to conjure up anything that might genuinely take you by surprise. What the show needs is a proper mystery and more character arcs that don’t immediately telegraph how doomed Derry’s residents are fated to be until a new group of intrepid monster slayers show up a few years down the line. But in its first season, Welcome to Derry just doesn’t have what it takes to tell a story you can really sink your teeth into.
It: Welcome to Derry also stars Madeleine Stowe, Rudy Mancuso, Mikkal Karim-Fidler, Kimberly Norris Guerrero, Joshua Odjick, and Morningstar Angeline. The series premieres on October 26th.