This is one of the latest MGM+ exclusive series that is supernatural show of sorts with a few elements of thriller or horror in it. It also appears to be some sort of teenage drama to get the highly sought after youth market potentially interested.
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The series is based on a Stephen King novel and at least for me, this is normally a sign that things have more of a potential to go wrong than they do to go write. I am one of those people of the opinion that while King has a lot of great books out there that two things are a problem anytime you are dealing with him: Most of his books have had bad film and television adaptation and the second thing is that the man has so much material, I believe more than 100 books, that not all of them are going to be great, especially not the ones that have complicated plots that are difficult and expensive to present on screen.
That being said I am keeping an open mind and have thus far, seen all of the episodes and most am not impressed up to this point.
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The story is broad and it could change perspective as the show progresses but thus for it is told mostly through the perspective of Luke, who is a child genius with incredible potential that one day wakes up in a replica of his bedroom only to discover that he has been kidnapped by a institute that appears to be part of the government, and he and other teens that have "powers" that are yet untapped are being trained to help with something yet to be defined. Something that is described as being one of the most important directives in the world.
We are not made very aware of what that actually is, but I would be willing to bet that because that this is a Stephen King story, that the institute is mostly doing bad things.
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The administrators of the facility for the most part are rather strange people and some of them are sadists or spooky people that mostly leave the kids that they kidnap to themselves. The kids aren't really given a choice in whether or not they will participate, but basic positive and negative reinforcement is used at will including beatings for negative and tokens for the snack machines as a positive.
There are not very many children in the institute but we are slowly introduced to all of them and here is where the show kind of lost me. I make no secret of the fact that I am not a fan of child actors unless they are truly exemplary and unfortunately there just aren't very many truly gifted child actors. Not everyone can pull a Macaulay Culkin.
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With the exception of unknown actor Joe Freeman who plays Luke, these kids can barely act at all and their performances just come across as amateurish. It doesn't help that Stephen King lost the ability to write a convincing child or teenager decades ago and the attempts and getting modern slang "correct" in the dialogue is extremely cringe.
The adult actors don't fare much better and the cast is mostly a who's who of who cares: Mary-Louise Parker is a standout here and I am thinking that she is going to be the only person in the cast that anyone recognizes although you probably aren't going to be sure why you recognize her.
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She plays the role of an administrator of the Institute and it is clear in just two episodes that she is going to have a crisis of conscious as the series goes on. Mark my words.
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There is a yet unrelated "side show" about a wandering pretty-boy who takes up a nighttime job at a nearby police station involving the only other person in the cast that can act, Ben Barnes. He plays the role of "Tim" and while we don't know in what capacity he ends up being involved in the main story, it is evident that he will be. For now, he is just quickly becoming a small town, Maine, hero in the local community - which by the way is an incredibly diverse town despite the fact that the actual Maine isn't diverse at all. King and MGM must still have DEI overlords because they tick a lot of racial and sexual-orientation boxes in just the first episode.
The story is meant to take place in small town Maine, but it is very clearly filmed in Canada, which is where almost all experimental and low-budget projects are filmed. I say this because you can hear it in the accents that a majority of the cast are not American. If you are American or know a lot of Canadians you will pick up on this right away as well. There's nothing wrong with this, but when this happens it is usually a good indicator that they are working with very little money and had to hire local talent which is why there are not a lot of hyperlinks on their wiki page - these people are mostly brand new actors and actresses and it definitely shows.
The sets don't fare much better either as the Institute itself, which is supposed to be a highly sophisticated clandestine structure, looks cheap and resembles more of an unused old school or factory than it does a state-of-the-art facility in modern times.
MGM doesn't disclose what their budget is but I can guarantee you that it isn't very much and this is clear in virtually every single scene in the series.
Should I watch it?
For most people I think this should be a hard pass but give it an episode if you need convincing. This is not a great show but it does kind of appear that it maybe could have been if they had significantly more money to play around with than they do. With such limited production capacity it shouldn't really be all that surprising that a grand scale thriller series can't really showcase what they were hoping for.
Stephen King's name doesn't really mean that much anymore seeing as how he appears to be willing to sell his IP's for just anyone that is willing to pay anything for them and for this one, it couldn't have been very much but what does King care? He doesn't appear to care at all seeing as how everything he cranks out gets turned into some sort of film or series.
I will say this though: I continue to watch it just to see how cringe and awful it will be and if it can get worse. I think it can and they are working on doing that. Normally the worst episodes of any series come in the middle and since there are only 8 episodes in total, 3-5 (the ones that are getting released next) should be absolute bangers in the awful category.
Filled with bad acting, cheap sets, and almost entirely unlikable characters, I can't really come up with much reason to watch this at all outside of seeing what sort of stupid S**T they are going to do next.
While this has a high IMDB rating, from what I have read almost all of the high rated ones seem AI generated whereas the low end ones are filled with spelling mistakes and seem more genuine. Those sites really can't be trusted anymore but if you watch just one episode you will understand that while I might not be correct in totally panning it, there is NO WAY that this is 7.8/10 like their IMDB rating suggests.
Currently, the only legal way to watch this is on MGM services, Amazon Prime, Spectrum, Fubo, hell...basically everyone except Netflix