Watching: Hysteria!

2024, download

Taking a brain-break from all the watching of Hallmarkies and the writing about Hallmarkies and posting something that didn't make it out of the Drafts. I think I am back on a "write about TV" hiatus, as we finished a number of shows, and I just haven't bothered to post a stub. I could blame this on the season (which despite my enthusiasm for the aforementioned Hallmarkies) I find quite ... mentally draining. Add to that my flu bug which came with major brain fog, and I just wanted to Watch, not Write.

Matthew Scott Kane turns up out of the blue as a showrunner for a series that doesn't need a season two as it does everything it requires in one. I was a shade disappointed that a show about "Satanic Panic" didn't even mention D&D but I understood that it had to focus on one thing (heavy metal music & culture) that the pop culture audience would understand.

What 100. Its 1989 in small town America. Two teens are kidnapped by strange, masked men. One turns up dead, the other finds her way home. Meanwhile a trio of high school friends are trying to figure out how to put their heavy metal garage band on the map, when the Pretty Popular Girl suggests they are part of a Satanic Cult. They decide to run with it and it... well, increases their popularity. Meanwhile the rest of the town spirals out of control over the death of the teen, and the idea that a Satanic Cult has come to their safe little place.

1 Great. Surprisingly, it was the deeper than usual characterization. In a show about heavy metal and 80s Satanism, I was expecting nothing but broad trope strokes for all the characters. Sure, it had more than its fair share of exaggerated characters but it needed them to play their parts. BUT for each of them it went just a bit further. Jordyn Stanwyck, or Jordy, is the goth girl in the band who at the beginning appears to have an unrequited love for main character Dylan. But a the show progresses and Dylan shows himself to be shallow and easily manipulated, her romantic attraction wanes while her friendship & loyalty increases. Dylan's father Gene starts as the usual kind of slow, unflappable father, unwavering faith in his son and family, but as his wife goes further and further down the Panic rabbit hole, you see him unravelling in small but increasing ways. Police Chief Dandridge starts as your typical small town cop, suspicious and authoritarian but as the Satanism comes to Happy Hollow he wants to curb the panic, but also cannot ignore what is happening (or is not happening) right in front of his eyes.

2 Good. That this was a show where I honestly did not know where it was going to go. I mean, technically it went exactly how I thought it would go, but every episode it had be doubting myself. Was it actually supernatural or just hysteria? Is it a double-bluff? The show skillfully left you questioning every scene. Were people actually seeing demons, or were they just suffering from mass-hysteria? What about the unexplained quake? It reminds unexplained. Why do they all see the same demon? I mean, that means there has to be a real demon, right? Why are normally stable, even keeled people going off the deep end? Are they playing at being a cult, or are they somehow actually mixed up in real Satanism? Is the deprogrammer / exorcist actually pulling demons out of people, or is he just a normal evil man torturing children? So many times, I thought it was going to take a turn right, and it screeched the tires and pulled left. Metaphorical directions, not political affiliations.

3 Bad. If anything fell, its that the show was all over the place. Yes, this was intentional, but often it felt like there wasn't really as much focus on the main characters (the metal kids pretending to be a cult) as there should be, and in doing so, it sacrificed more exploration of them as people. I wanted to know them more, sympathize with them more.