Lovecraft Country Review

The idea is superb. Lovecraft's fiction is full of a terror of the other, its author's racism is documented, and turning that inside out so that Black travellers in 1950s America face both shoggoths and sundown towns is the kind of concept that justifies a series by itself. The first episode delivers on it completely, with a sheriff counting down the minutes to sunset while something worse waits in the woods. Jurnee Smollett is magnetic throughout and Michael K. Williams is superb in the little he is given.

But the season is structurally chaotic. Each episode adopts a different genre, haunted house, body swap, Korean War romance, Indiana Jones pastiche, time travel, and the connecting mythology about a magic order and a book of names is explained repeatedly and never becomes coherent. Characters change motivation between hours. Several plotlines are simply dropped. The horror imagery is genuinely striking and the historical sequences hit hard, but a series this ambitious needed a spine, and it never grew one before cancellation.