Summary
Teacup’s premiere has far too much exposition and implies more than it reveals, but there are glimmers of the show it might develop into.
A name seems to carry more weight in the horror genre than anywhere else. You see Jordan Peele or James Wan or Ryan Murphy – or even, to a more questionable extent, Jason Blum or M. Night Shyamalan or whoever – on a poster and you kind of know what to expect. Teacup, a Peacock adaptation of Robert McCammon’s sci-fi horror novel Stinger, has that vibe about it; something you’re intrigued by and willing to be patient with because of name association alone. After Episode 1, “Think About the Bubbles”, I have no idea, really, what this show is going to be like or even if it’s going to be any good. But James Wan is pretty decent, right?
The premiere feels like a cross between Outer Range and Nope. It’s set on a small farm in Georgia where a small group of people are trapped for as-yet elusive reasons. Despite a cold open in which a woman briefly escapes from some zip-ties in the forest, looking and sounding rather bedraggled, most of the runtime is devoted to introducing various members of the Chenoweth family.
Maggie and James have two kids, Arlo and Meryl, and James’s mother Ellen is also around. The place is eerie by default – it’s in the middle of nowhere, which is never good in the horror genre – and then by design, since all the animals start to act weird, the radio plays up, and that woman from the opening is still roaming around the surrounding woods. When a goat goes missing and Arlo follows it, we all know exactly who he’s going to bump into.
This kind of dumb behavior does worry me so early on. The exposition is also egregious, though you can forgive it to a certain extent. There are a lot of characters to keep track of here, which becomes more of a problem when an entirely different family, the Shanleys – Ruben, Valeria, and their son Nicholas – show up so that Maggie, a veterinarian, can treat one of their spooked and injured horses.
It’s obvious from the Shanley animals behaving out of character as well that whatever is going on in the background of this show isn’t specific to the Chenoweths or their property. In the press, I’ve seen this show described as a “keyhole epic”, a very small slice of a much wider story. But with this many characters, it nonetheless feels pretty wide – arguably too wide – for the audience to keep track of.
Teacup | Image via Peacock
When Arlo doesn’t return from the forest even once darkness falls, search parties are formed – Meryl and Nicholas; James and Valeria – to look for him and imply even more complex dynamics. I’m pretty sure James and Valeria have had an affair, for instance. Maggie, who remains back at the farm to treat Reuben’s horse, knows about the affair generally but not that it was specifically with Valeria. There’s a lot going on here.
The horse treatment scene is, I think, a glimmer of what Teacup could be outside of the expository confines of Episode 1. It’s very tense even though nothing happens in it; the chunk of wood lodged in the nag’s neck turns out not to be nicking the carotid artery, but the suggestion it might be works well enough. I’m pretty sensitive about any harm coming to animals, to be fair, but I still think the overall construction of this scene just works, and you can imagine it being a rubric for tenser moments to come.
The more overt horror stuff is out in the woods. For one thing, there’s clearly a possession element involved, or perhaps a sci-fi tinge, as we see that the erratic woman Arlo bumps into transfers something to him; it passes between their eyes. Freed from the thing’s influence the woman seems relatively even-keel, but Arlo takes on the same kind of mumbling erraticism when he emerges from the woods and collapses into Maggie’s arms.
There’s also some kind of monster in the woods. The search parties get a glimpse of it, and another neighbor, Donald Kelly, turns up to try and shoot it. I have no idea what this is about yet, but the monster does seem to kill the woman who possessed Arlo toward the end of the episode.
Speaking of the end of the episode, things kick into a bit of a higher gear there, with a man in a rather ominous-looking gas mask spraying a blue boundary around the farm. It seems very likely that everyone there is going to be trapped there for the foreseeable future, which is good for the audience. The residents, though, perhaps not so much.
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