Schitt’s Creek boss’s new show is a cross between The Good Place and Severance
Contains very minor spoilers for The Big Door Prize.
At first glance, Schitt’s Creek writer/producer David West Read’s new show shares one obvious similarity with his previous success – both The Big Door Prize and Schitt’s Creek focus on small town America and the quirky characters who live there.
Like Schitt's, it is a comedy, but The Big Door Prize is also a mystery, a drama and even a thought-provoking look at how we humans fumble our way through life, desperate for someone – or in this case, something – to give us a gentle nudge in the right direction.
Think the sci-fi of Severance meeting the philosophy of The Good Place with a little of Stephen King’s Needful Things mixed in, and you get the idea.
And, by the way, the end result is pretty brilliant.
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Based on M O Walsh’s 2020 novel, the 10-episode Apple TV+ series is set in the small town of Deerfield, home to teacher Dusty (Chris O’Dowd, doing the everyman thing he does so well), his wife Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) and their teen daughter Trina (Djouliet Amara).
So far, so normal – that is until an arcade-style machine called Morpho mysteriously, perhaps magically, appears in the local general store. No one knows where it has come from, but soon the whole town is gripped by the contraption that promises to reveal a person’s true potential.
You just feed 50 cents into the Morpho and out pops a blue card that contains a single word or phrase. It could say ‘meteorologist’ or ‘dancer’ or ‘guitarist’ or something more head-scratching like ‘superstar’ or ‘hero’. It’s up to each recipient to decide whether to be the thing that their card tells them they are supposed to be, even if it is a career or mindset they have never dreamed of before.
Of course, as the residents of Deerfield embrace Morpho’s revelations, everyday life is disrupted as they all search for meaning, direction and their true potential – whether it is the chance to become a male model in middle age, or step out from the shadow of a brother, or recklessly zoom through the town on a motorbike.
Dusty – celebrating his 40th birthday and happy in his marriage to Cass – is just one of those affected as Morpho’s personal prediction (which we won't spoil here) brings doubt about his own path and relationships. There’s also teenager Jacob (Sammy Fourlas), who may have a very good reason to dismiss his own blue card, Cass’s icy mother, whose card brings back memories of opportunities missed, and local priest Father Reuben’s (Damon Gupton), whose printed ‘potential’ is a truly heartbreaking one.
Each episode highlights one person’s card and their reaction to it, and ends with the next person seeing their card for the first time, with their own story revealed in the following episode. It’s a handy way of introducing all the townspeople and letting us get to know them quickly – by the third episode relationships and personalities are well established, and it’s easy to take characters into your heart, from loveable couple Cass and Dusty to well-written, believable (and nice) teenagers Trina and Jacob.
There is, of course, a central mystery about what the Morpho machine is, where it came from, and what it is really for (and why it requires each person’s social security number and fingerprints to be activated) – as well as those Good Place-like deep dives into our humanity and our need for answers to the small things as well as big stuff like the meaning of life.
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There’s humour in all that, too, in the ensemble performances, and in the quirky touches creator David West Read weaves in throughout. A trip to a local Italian restaurant that offers a piled-high hill of spaghetti as a speciality and laser tag and sports arcade games (beware that basketball as it flies past your pasta) on site is hilarious. And that's before a couple ‘sails’ past at a table set on an indoor gondola that glides up and down the room. (Yes, we want to go there, too).
While you could grumble – spoiler alert – that the questions about Morpho may not be satisfyingly answered by the end of episode 10, on the plus side that means there is still much to learn about Deerfield’s mechanical marvel and the townsfolk so attached to it. Assuming we're lucky enough to get a second season of this sweet, clever and unmissable comedy drama.
The Big Door Prize streams on Apple TV+ from March 29.
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