I have a pet theory that horror, as a genre, is an awkward fit for television. The tension necessary for effective scares is difficult to maintain over several hours; the mystery that creates suspense is hard to square with building characters and worlds through exposition. Auteurs like Mike Flanagan and Ryan Murphy are exceptions that make the rule — and even Murphy’s influential anthology “American Horror Story” has faded from the cultural high water mark of its first three seasons. “Stranger Things” may have been an era-defining hit for Netflix, but the Duffer Brothers’ breakout show is more of a youthful adventure with accents of horror.
The Duffers themselves decamp Netflix for Paramount next month, but this week sees the debut of their first non-“Stranger Things” production for the service. (Science fiction series “The Boroughs” will follow in May.) Created and showrun by Haley Z. Boston, “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” initially confirmed my prior suspicions. For a full half of its eight-episode season, “Something Very Bad” has to conceal what’s really going on with upstate wedding between psychology grad student Rachel (Camila Morrone) and sweet, milquetoast Nicky (Adam DiMarco) at his family’s creepy, snowbound country cabin. Ultimately, I quite liked the show “Something Very Bad” becomes once Boston and her team put their cards on the table. But that show is different enough from the initial presentation, and takes long enough to reveal itself, that I’m not convinced “Something Very Bad” is best served by its chosen format.
The series does revel in its bait-and-switch, as is its right. The already anxious Rachel, who lost her mother as an infant and is estranged from her dad, has a bad feeling about her nuptials in five days. You can’t blame her: she hasn’t even met Nicky’s family before, let alone been to the house where they’re hosting the celebration. Nor does the Cunningham clan make a strong first impression. Patriarch Boris’ (Ted Levine) idea of stress relief is turning animal corpses into taxidermy. His wife Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) swans around the house making cryptic statements in her nightgown. Nicky’s sister Portia (Gus Birney) seems intent on hijacking the wedding, spearheading everything from food to decor. His brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch) just seems like a dick — and Jules’ wife Nell (Karla Crome) also happens to be Nicky’s ex.
Rachel understandably starts to worry the Cunninghams are in some kind of conspiracy against her. They keep whispering in hushed tones when they think she’s out of earshot. Her wedding dress goes missing, and Portia’s all too eager to swap it out for Victoria’s old one. There’s a weird family portrait with a blank spot for Nicky’s future wife. And given the prevalence of malevolent, predatory rich people in pop culture — plus the subgenre of nightmare in-laws, as seen lately in “Love Story” and “Ready or Not 2” — it’s not a great sign that the family’s humble country retreat turns out to be a sprawling property. On the other hand, all these omens popping up so early in the season is an indication there are further twists to come.
The all-female directing team (led by producing director Weronika Tofilska, who helms half the season) take evident pleasure in effectively ramping up Rachel’s unease with jump scares and desolate, depopulated landscapes. But it also takes an entire episode for the (sort of) happy couple to arrive at the cabin, and several more for the true premise and themes of “Something Very Bad” to reveal themselves. I am, of course, forbidden from disclosing what those are — but I can say they’re accompanied by a tonal shift that’s more wryly comedic and delightfully deadpan than what comes before.
Side B of “Something Very Bad” also shifts the focus to the nature of Rachel and Nicky’s relationship. Initially, Morrone and DiMarco’s performances hew closely to horror archetypes: her the panicked, presumably final girl; him the clueless, potentially gaslighting dope who acknowledges her concerns without taking them seriously. But the questions then raised about whether the pair is right for each other, and what expectations about marriage they’ve inherited from their respective parents, call for retroactively turning them into individuals with a complex dynamic there’s not enough time to fully shade in.
Television has proven an ideal vehicle for putting romantic bonds under the microscope. (Here I must point, once again, to “Love Story” — a commercial and creative success.) In the name of obscuring the real deal with the Cunninghams, as well as Rachel herself, “Something Very Bad” has to compress the very undertaking it’s so suited for into a too-narrow space. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the refreshingly wacky tone of the back half from straight-up messy storytelling. Suddenly Portia has the ability to communicate with the dead, just when Rachel could use a medium? OK! The chaos is still an acceptable price to pay for Birney’s expertly offputting performance, a shrill mania that gets increasingly comic over time.
“Something Very Bad” ends up hinging on whether Rachel and Nicky are truly convinced that they’re soulmates. It’s an intriguing question, one that the show pokes at by unpacking their origin story of an airport meet-cute. But the show waits so long to set up these stakes I found myself preoccupied by other mysteries, like: Would this work better as a movie, compressing all the events into a single weekend? Or a slightly shorter series that dispensed with the preamble, but gave the real meat of the story more room to breathe? I don’t have the answers. I just enjoyed parts of “Something Very Bad” enough to crave a structure that was better suited to showing them off.
All eight episodes of “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” are now streaming on Netflix.
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