HBO-oh-OH! The premiere genre channel?

Raised by Wolves - HBO Max/Crave/CTV Sci-Fi (5 episodes watched)
Lovecraft Country - HBO (5 episodes watched)

Game of Thrones's success has led to a monumental shift in HBO's programming.  I'm hardpressed to think of a genre show (when I say "genre" I mean nerd-stuff like Horror, Superheroes & Sci-Fi, not like westerns and crime procedurals) on the Home Box Office prior to that series launch.  I would have to hazard a guess that it created such a seismic impact on how the channel views its audience that they're now trying very, very hard to keep feeding the beast.  The reality is Generation X and those that followed were raised on a steady diet of science fiction, space opera, horror and superheroes.  Look at the biggest films of the past 50 years - Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, E.T., Back to the Future, Batman, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park... and that just takes us from 1970 to 1995.  From '95 to 2020, it's monolithic superhero, fantasy and sci-fi franchises with horror always being cheap to make and making some major money for smaller studios.  Nerds and geeks are the mainstream.  HBO is aging out of its "sophisticated drama" and "elitist comedy" audience and striving for sophisticated and elitist genre programming, and by gum, it's working.

This year has been particularly stellar in HBO's slate of genre programming, starting with Watchmen, the absolutely brilliant de-facto sequel to the classic graphic novel which ended its 9-episode run January, followed by a revamped, Blade Runner-inspired third season of Westworld and the sharp and snarky Avenue 5, a comedy about a space cruise line gone horribly awry.  Then we have this summer two massive new endeavours: Raised By Wolves and Lovecraft Country.

Both shows are drastically different from each other but feel very "HBO" in that they play drastically different than most other television programming.  When other channels like AMC, Showtime, FX or even Netflix and Hulu are doing when they unveil the best of their best is trying to present shows that would feel at home on HBO.  An HBO program shows a commitment to integrity and vision, where storytelling is condensed, focussed, and swerves away from convention where others might veer right into it.

The trailer for Raised By Wolves looked like bog-standard sci-fi.  A refugee colony of children on an alien planet are raised by androids, and then come a group of human adults who want to disrupt their peace, not believing children should be raised by androids.   It looked like tedious, desert sci-fi, ala Earth 2  and other '90's snooze-fests.  What it had going for it was Ridley Scott, directing the first two episodes and executive producing the series.  It's not that Scott's genre track record is spotless (Gods of Egypt, Alien: Covenant) but generally, he fares well, and with this looks were most certainly deceiving.

 

Created by Aaron Guzikowski, his original concept as far as I could discern, a small shuttle crash lands on the planet Kepler-22b.  It's manned by two androids, Mother and Father.  They make each others' acquaintances upon evacuating the crash site, and saving its very modest cargo.  A portable shelter is erected and Father gets to work settling while mother is hooked up to small embryonic chambers and she brings the babies to term.  Through a quick series of vignettes, the children age, the agriculture of the settlement expands, and Mother and Father find a shared sense of purpose, a common ground for raising a family.  But the children get sick, and over time all but one of them dies, after ten years it's just Mother, Father and Campion as apparently the last gasp of athiestic human civilization.  

Then approaches a ship, the Mithraic refugees, the last survivors of Earth, have come to Kepler-22b.  A brutal war was waged on earth for years between the extreme poles of athiests and followers of Sol.  Their war left the Earth utterly scarred and uninhabitable.  Mother was a Mithraic siren, an adroid of mass destruction and murder, reprogrammed by an athiest to be the matriarch of a new, godless society, free from the corruption of belief and religion.  But if the harshness of survival on Kepler weren't enough to put that in jeopardy, the Mithraic survivors - mostly holy men, warriors and androids - certainly won't help.  Their first encounter trigger's Mother's siren protocols and things go very very badly for the Mithraic.  Mother saves the children from the ship and destroys nearly everyone else.

 

Among the Mithraic survivors are two athiest soldiers who have had plastic surgery to  disguise themselves as noble soldiers in order to evacuate the planet.  Further complications arise when they learn the identities they took over were parents of a young boy.  Yet even further complications for them when they are among the last of the Mithraic survivors, putting their sanctity and devotion to religion to the test, and also trying to lead the Mithraic back towards Mother's camp to rescue the children.

The show craftily explores what happens when two sides of an issue can no longer peacefully co-exist, as if only one side or the other has absolute right to exist, and the other must be destroyed.  There's a similar play in American (and to a lesser but no less troubling extent, Global) politics that finds the divide between different sides utterly unbridgeable.  The show is less about politics than the ramifications of being so inflexibly divergent, but even by the third episode the conclusion that both belief (or faith) and agnostic skepticism have their place, and moreover are essential to existence.  Utter adherence to doctrine finds man believing it absolves them of monstrous behaviour, while absolute adherence to the lack of existence of God to the point of intolerance, it makes enemies of believers.  Both sides find no room for doubt, but doubt is critical to understanding, entertaining the possibility is enough to find empathy.

The show also explores what makes a family, and I love how it handles the Mother/Father dynamic.  What starts out as very mechanical, very alien, almost an uncanny valley representation of parental dynamics becomes more an exploration of what give and take needs to occur in parenting.  Parents should ascribe to the same concepts of nurturing and discipline, but too often don't.  Even if programmed to do so, disagreements in specific methods of rearing young still come up, and the androids need to compromise.

Raised by Wolves is beyond the bog standard, for sure.  There's great thought put into the dynamics between characters, the evolution of both individuals and groups, and sufficiently making the desert seem like an interesting place (delving into the pasts of the characters on Earth and the war that was waged there help to break up the sandy monotony).  I find the Mithraic religion very curious, and the eye-catching military design resembling Arthurian knights (but with a futuristic spin) adds parallels to medieval crusades.

Post-apocalyptic + alien planet + robots + medieval inspired costumes = I don't think I've watch a show that just screams "Toast!" so much in a long time.

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The first episode of Lovecraft Country opens in black and white in the trenches of the Korean War.  A soldier leads the charge, shooting, stabbing and bashing the enemy.  He pauses to breathe, an expression of both awe and horror on his face as he takes in his situation.  Planes roar overhead and bombs drop.  The subsequent explosion is a furious orange and yellow.  As he climbs out of the trenches, the black and white slowly gives way to stark elements of colour, as the battlefield isn't just men and guns and tanks but ufos glowing green,  red-eyed, long-legged tripods, and winged tentacled creatures, and it just gets more bizarre from there, until Atticus "Tic" Freeman (Jonathan Majors - the next big star) awakens from the dream where the fantasy stories have merged with his own experience of war.  Back in the US, Tic is returning home, but despite being a veteran he's still a second-class citizen, relegated to a segregated section of the bus, and forced to walk the rest of the way to town when the bus breaks down.

It's a bold opening, delivering the message that this show is going to both deliver some very highly fantastical elements while also be firmly rooted in America's dirty history.  It's the same slap-in-the-face that Watchmen delivered, instantly undermining any expectations of frivolousness, and backing it up with a solid hour of the uneasy reality of being Black in the 1950's (as opposed to the uneasy reality of being Black in any other decade).  Given protests around the many murders and racial injustices of Black men and women that have been dominating the news cycle in 2020 (next to COVID-19 and an endless stream of Trump bullshit) it seems an especially apt time for shows like Watchmen and Lovecraft Country to reflect upon the present day with historical context, but the sad reality is these types of stories at any time would carry the same relevance.  The positive is that they are receiving both the budget and attention they deserve, when this would likely not have been the case even ten years ago.

That first hour of Lovecraft Country deals with introducing our main players and their dynamics - Tic, his uncle George (Courtney B Vance), his Aunt Hyppolyta (Aunjanue Ellis - I loved that George and Hyppolita were introduced in bed together...not just expressing Black love, but also late-middle age love), his old neighbourhood friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett), her half-sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) and the spectre of Tic's dad, Montrose (who we meet in the second episode, played by Michael K Williams).  George publishes a travel guide written specifically for Black Americans to navigate through the country (a big old middle finger to the Oscar-winning, white-gazing Green Book) and the tenor of the show hovers largely around the unease that white America has with their semi-liberated Black population, and the deeply aggressive racism that prevails.  Late in the first first act the omnipresence of racism is temporarily put aside as some seriously nasty, Lovecraftian creatures attack.  The threats are many fold.

I love how the show started so epically, then grounded itself in a rooted reality, built up the characters and some very relatable relationships, and then thrust these characters in an all too real and uncomfortable horror before upending it all with something much more fantastical.  And then it goes full Sam Raimi/Evil Dead 2.  It gets gross, but playfully so.  It's almost a welcome tension breaker from the racism to have something much more external come in and terrify everyone.

There's an abrupt jump after the attack of the Lovecraftian terrors ends where our protagonists find themselves at the door of a mansion, greeted by a character (and vehicle) which only appeared like a blur earlier in the episode.  It's a very strange editing decision, and it leads directly into the second episode which tonally takes such an abrupt turn from the first episode that it threatens to sink the series entirely.

Seriously, the second episode kind of sucks.

There's a mystery throughout the first episode, the maguffin of Tic's missing father, which leads us to a secret society where Tic and his family have a very important role to play. The bulk of the episode takes place in the aforementioned mansion, and tries to weave its way through destinies, and bloodlines, and magic and power...and more stuff.  It's a lot of world building that is at total odds with the world built in the first episode.  Certainly the role a group of Black people play in this very white organization does hold the lens of racism up to these types of stories, but it tonal whiplash that I found very hard to resolve.  Not to mention the editing is rough, and the score for the episode is so overbearing that it makes it hard to concentrate on what's actually being said.  I was almost ready to tap out of the series after that one.

The third episode rebounds, putting the focus squarely on Leti (and her relationships with her sister and with Tic), as she buys a haunted house in a white neighbourhood and has to deal with terrors both external and internal.  It's a little wonky of a story, but it helps establish that Lovecraft Country as a series is more episodic than serial in nature.  There is progression of relationships and character but each episode shifts into different horror subgenres and changes the spotlight.   The fourth episode is kind of Indiana Jones-inspired as Leti, Tic and  Montrose try and fill in some gaps in their understanding of their place in recent events.  The fifth episode is magnificent, putting Ruby in the spotlight and goes straight-up body horror as she takes a potion that allows her to temporarily become a white woman.

Any one of these episodes could fuel a much longer arc for the characters, but the show is designed (apparently like Matt Ruff's novel it's based on) as a series of almost separate vignettes that build the larger whole.  I really like this format of storytelling in novels, and it's rarely employed, nevermind employed well on television.  Usually a show is either firmly serialized or a very structured episodic, it's not very common to get what's essentially a serialized anthology.  But the sort of subgenre and style jumping the show does from episode to episode, for the most part (so far) makes it rather wonderful.  Even if I've only love 2/5ths of the output so far, the strength of those 2/5ths and aspects of the larger world make it very worthwhile.  And I like the shifting focus from character to character, which is certainly helped by an outstanding cast.  Seriously all the major players are outstanding even when the material is less so.  I'm eagerly awaiting the Auntie Hyppolita episode.

 It's been a crazy see-saw ride...from being all in within the first three minutes to almost bailing completely through the second hour, to appreciating it much more at the fourth hour to absolutely swooning for actress Wunmi Mosaku as much as the camera does every time Ruby's on screen.  It's not the nearly perfect streak of Watchmen, but it's upholding the same principles of telling a wildly entertaining story while also being very conscious of what its mere existence means, and handling that very responsibly.