4 out of 5

Created by: Nick Antosca

covers season 1

Everyone keeps ragging on SyFy for having lame programming ‘except for’ whichever show they’re watching, but I think the time for Sharknado jokes has passed.  Even schlock purveyors Asylum can flip things to give us the better zombie show on TV with Z-Nation; SyFy might still have a lot of crap in its ranks, but its got a lot of good stuff, too, enough so that new shows are generally worth a watch.  And if you think your AMCs or HBOs ate above channel clutter, try sifting through their full programming from the last years – I promise you, you’ll find crap there as well, and perhaps even more offensive crap because it hides behind the luster of its host.

The promos for Channel Zero looked good, the concept sounded good, the art looked good.  Was it good?  Yes, yes it was, and its also, I’d say, very much a new frontier for TV in general, which is pretty sweet.  Not the anthology format, with each season being a separate story; whether that was American Horror Story or some other source, that’s become an increasingly popular method for telling deep stories and retaining a creative team while not having to get bogged down on multi-season mythology, and I think its an awesome trend.  Channel Zero wisely adopts a shorter season UK format for this style, with 6 episodes, and I do hope the less-is-more approach also becomes a norm for US TV, as the many-years standard 22-episode format works for procedurals but our current movie-like storytelling suffers from way too much padding at that size, and even at 13 eps.  6 is just about the perfect size.

What’s new to television, as far as I’m aware, is CZ’s source material: Creepypasta.  I’ll butcher the definition, but you could look at it, in a way, as a crowd-sourced story, generally of the folklore variety, with a horror bent.  Channel Zero’s first season tale, Candle Cove, based on a creepypasta tale, had a singular author – Kris Straub, but a given cp’s popularity derives from the way its presented and then shared – a story told in pieces in forums and then copied and pasted and forwarded, adding an allure of anonymity to the original source.  Maybe that doesn’t seem like a life-changing shift, but what gets me is that this is very much by-the-people, for-the-people: Straub is a web cartoonist, which, excusing hosting costs, is a free enterprise borne of your own efforts.  His source creepypasta was, and still is, free to experience.  This isn’t a Marvel franchise or Harry Potter, this is you, or anyone, creating something, offering it up for everyone, and then having it turned into a TV show.  Pretty sweet.  There have been other efforts with internet / cp sources, but I think this is the first high profile one to make it.  So, yeah.

Is that all I’ve got?  Nah, the four stars are earned by the content, I just had to insert my requisite pre-review blabber.  For my fans.  You understand.

…Story adapter Nick Antosca went above the call in expanding a short story to eight hours of material.  Channel Zero has a purposefully dreamy pace to it, but the story and concepts are properly inched forward by each entry, the wonderfully creepy vibe layered on moreso as well, making sequential watching feel like its worth the time and not just stalling for a reveal.  Along those lines, while there’s been back and forth over the show’s logic and explanations, I found that it sat at a fair balance between justification and mystery, and I especially appreciated the ending, which took steps to actually end and not take the easy way out by backing off into vaguery.  The dialogue can be a bit stilted; as with a lot of these small-town Twin Peaksy setups, people swerve their way around conversations rather oddly and are fond of oblique statements, but the show at least stays in character.  Same too for the visuals, which establish a very, very slow pan style for scene observations, and practical effects that mostly avoid jump scares.  You know which show you are watching by the look and feel of any given scene.

Series 1 is subtitled Candle Cove, the name of a puppet show several local kids grew up watching, which is disturbingly revealed to… never having actually aired.  It would appear to have a mesmeric effect on its viewers, and it apparently went off the air right around the time all those dead children were found in the woods, yippee.  When Mike, the brother of one of the deceased, now a child psychologist, comes back to town years later, the past seems to reignite: More dead bodies, and suddenly the show seems to be back…

You can just feel the urban legend vibe there yeah?

There are a few bumps in the road, of course.  Lead actor Paul Schneider, as Mike, has, for lack of a better word, a somewhat sniveling personage.  It’s hard to imagine him as a professional, likeable person beyond the harried state we meet him in.  While this was seemingly purposeful, as the character and actor slip into something much more professional and relatable when he finds himself in his psychologist role, we mostly deal with the sniveling version, and this was a slight barrier to getting into the story, which is primarily his.  The developers also handicapped themselves – wisely – with their slow pacing and avoidance of typical horror scares, in the sense that the frights are narrowed down to short clips of the puppet show, and one main awesome monster.  But you can feel them wriggling in their production chairs to toss more cool stuff on the screen, and occasionally that urge gets the better of them, with some randomized visuals that divert from the tension a bit, and especially in the last episode, where we go full Silent Hill with some imagery.  It no denying looks cool, but there’s not the same sense of build up or discovery attached as to the other ideas.  And to add one final positive/negative criticism, choosing one director for the series was smartly in line with the consistent writer, and even better to choose an indie guy who worked the slow and creepy method wonderfully.  But the dedication to this style seemed to a fault: The snail’s pace lent itself to lingering shots that felt pointless as often as they did point-ful, and the theme of repetition – added to the slowness – gives us some sections of episodes that felt like we’d seen them once too many times.

But again, note that all of those comments ride piggyback to things they did really well.  First and foremost: Making a spooky show.  I don’t know that we’ve ever really had a truly scary show that didn’t divert into Twin Peaks quirk or X-Files “explain it by the end of the episode”ness.  The habit of late has certainly been to err toward gore, but that and creepiness certainly don’t go hand in hand.

So drop the disparaging SyFy comments.  Not only was the genesis of this show awesome, but it stayed true to its intentions and managed to maintain its spooky vibe through and through.