Genre TV shows strive for one crucial goal. Keep you watching at all costs.
Sure, that’s the plan for any series, but horror/sci-fi yarns have an ace up their sleeves. Just ask the team behind “Lost.” You had to keep watching to uncover the mystery, even if the final reveal lets down well, almost everyone.
That’s the best reason to stick with “Teacup,” now playing on Peacock. The head-scratcher stars Yvonne Strahovski as an animal vet whose micro-community comes under attack.
By what? We haven’t a clue.
How? See above.
The purpose? Keep watching.
Strahovski stars as Maggie, a mother of two with a strained relationship with her husband James (Scott Speedman). We know little about the chasm between them, save that his mother (Kathy Baker) is living with them, ostensibly for support.
There’s no time to tease out any interpersonal struggles. The couple’s young son goes missing in the first episode. He wandered into the neighboring woods without a word.
Meanwhile, strange happenings start to plague their Georgia home. The lights begin to flicker (the hoariest horror cliche of them all). Their car won’t start. Cell phone service? Nothing doing.
The show, spun from Robert McCammon’s novel “Stinger,” lets Maggie’s neighbors enter the frame. They sense that the weird occurrences may not be random.
Strahovski is more than capable of anchoring the story while Speedman’s James eschews guns in times of trouble. That seems like a problem given the eerie chain of events, but so be it.
Other characters fail to leave a mark early on, save a neighbor happily clinging to his gun.
The more the story unfolds, the more questions crop up. It feels manipulative, even by TV standards, but we’ll have to have faith that at least some questions will be answered sooner than later.
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The setting offers promise. The family home is set in a sprawling tract of land, and it’s clear there’s little help coming from a neighboring town. Isolation might have been a benefit for the clan before. Now, with so much uncertainty, it’s a curse.
Some genre elements seem all too familiar. Dogs bark at unseen threats. A stricken child speaks in an unexplainable tongue. Neighbors make rash decisions sure to backfire.
Production values prove clean and appropriate, and an early splash of gore catches us by surprise.
It’s hard to imagine what force could cause all of the curiosities striking the main characters. What’s clear is that writer Ian McCulloch demands our patience.
Episode two features a wrinkle straight from a Stephen King story, adding another befuddling element to a story that nearly capsizes with them.
“Teacup” almost screams, “Proceed with caution.” We know what happens when a film or TV series piles on too many mysteries. The Jenga tower, more often than not, eventually comes tumbling down.
(Photo by Mark Hill/Peacock)
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