It: Welcome to Derry Review

A prequel to films that were themselves an adaptation is a thin premise, and the series seems to know it, so it spends the money on the town instead. Derry in 1962 is the best thing here: a segregated air force base, a missing child nobody official will discuss, and a civic silence the show treats as the actual monster. Chris Chalk and Jovan Adepo carry that half, and Andy Muschietti directs the period material with more patience than the features allowed him.

Reviews came in around four fifths positive but with a much cooler weighted average, and the gap between those two readings is the show itself. The child ensemble is asked to reproduce the 2017 film's dynamic without that film's script. The set pieces escalate into gore early and then keep escalating, so by the fifth hour a sequence that would have frightened anyone in episode one simply arrives and passes.

The mythology, pulled from the novel's deeper history, is doled out in flashback lumps that stall the story every time. It found a large audience, grew across its run, and is renewed for a second season set in 1935. The atmosphere is genuine. The plotting is a mess.