Peacock’s Teacup Okay At Filling Time During Spooky Season
Image Courtesy of Peacock/CBR
By Dean Robbins
This review is of the first two episodes of the new Peacock original series Teacup, starring Yvonne Strahovski and Scott Speedman.
CUA can feel like a protective bubble. When you step outside its bounds, you are often instantly reminded of the harsh reality of modern urban living. We don’t live in a safe world. In Teacup, Peacock’s new original series to ring in the 2024 Halloween season, a family and a few neighbors find themselves stuck in a bubble.
Mother Maggie (Yvonne Strahovski) is an equine veterinarian who is rolling her eyes through a struggling marriage and a cranky mother-in-law (Kathy Baker). Father James (Scott Speedman) is troubled for reasons unknown, but it may be attributed to a potential entanglement with neighbor Valeria (Diany Rodriguez). Daughter Meryl (Emilie Bierre) is developing a friendship and possible relationship with Valeria’s son Nicholas (Luciano Leroux). Son Arlo (Caleb Dolden) went missing into the woods and came back an hour later bruised and talking as if in a trance. Moments later, electricity and all cellular signals are lost.
The show, created by Yellowstone producer Ian McCulloch and produced by horror legend James Wan, is trying to be many things. It is, first and foremost, a J.J. Abrams-esque mystery box in the vein of Lost. There is also a little bit of family drama and dimly-colored visual style reminiscent of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House and a dose of Western flair from McCulloch’s Yellowstone.
The trouble is that the sum of these parts is underdeveloped, and worse, not very engaging. The pilot episode makes it clear, especially through the score, that something bad is going to happen. A grim opening shows a bloodied woman frantically running through the woods away from an unknown threat. We immediately want to know what is going on. But unfortunately, the characters themselves are given only the thinness of development before being thrown into chaos.
What’s even worse is the dialogue. No one talks normally and not in a stylistic way. In fact, better dialogue could have made the whole project far more watchable. Dramatic tension quickly flushes out the door when nothing is believable.
The good news is that the show has a chance of getting better. With the characters seemingly trapped together for most of the show, there should be plenty of room for better development. Episode Two ends with a particularly gruesome moment of body horror that could indicate dark directions the story may be headed in.
The second episode is notably stronger than the pilot. I do not mind shorter episode runtimes (these run around 30 minutes), but more viewers may have wanted to stick around if the first two episodes were combined. The stakes are communicated in a far more interesting and shocking way than before. The pilot is so vague that it is hard to care and the ending ambiguously points at the larger premise.
Teacup releases two new episodes every Thursday ending on Halloween. It is exclusively streaming on Peacock.
