Séamas O'Reilly: The merits of horror series 'From' - and the horrors of streaming media

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

For most of the past week I’ve been obsessed with a small American town. It has no name, but upon entering you cannot leave. Contact with the outside world is impossible, and you are trapped in your new locale with dozens of other people, all stranded here through similar means, and all beset by a dizzying array of strange phenomena, mysteries and hallucinations.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, every night, as soon as it gets dark, you must remain indoors because monsters disguised as smiling villagers will attempt to turn you inside out so they can feast on your flesh and bones.

I speak, of course, of From, a silly and staggeringly addictive horror series which is, strangely, in its second season. I say ‘strangely’, because prior to last week I’d never seen or heard anyone talking about this show.

To be fair, since I started watching it, this trend has continued. In an odd parallel of the show’s premise, it is now me who finds himself trapped in a strange place, incapable of communicating this new reality to anyone on the outside. 

I’ve tried my best to recommend it to people, and it’s not exactly hard to find. It’s available to watch on Amazon Prime, NOW TV, and Sky Sci-Fi, but my pleas fall on deaf ears, because recommending TV shows is not the fizzing joy it once was.

You remember it, don’t you, the distant past of, say, ten years ago? Back when hearing someone rave about a TV show was a jolt of secret knowledge imparted to improve your cultural life. 

Now, when you recommend a show, it’s with the knowledge that whoever you’re talking to already has so many things in their to-watch pile that any added suggestions are a grave inconvenience. 

Being told of another that you simply have to catch up with now feels less like advice and more like an attack, like those articles which solemnly say you now need to drink 18 glasses of water a day or you’ll get bubonic plague, which is back somehow. 

Stranger still, I have several times taken this advice, found the show, and discovered I watched it in full some months previously, but had forgotten it entirely.

Despite all this, I am using my bully pulpit to recommend From here, because I am sick to death of not having anyone to talk to about it. At the outset, I should make it clear that the show’s premise is not original in and of itself. Its ‘town you can’t leave’ plot has been used before, most recently in Apple+’s Silo 2013 series Under The Dome, and most notably in John Carpenter’s underrated 1994 horror fantasy, In The Mouth of Madness.

Tonally, it also owes a lot to the all-time “how the hell do we get out of here?” classic, Lost. This is appropriate enough, given that it stars Lost alum Harold Perrineau, and Lost director Jack Bender is both an executive producer and has helmed many of its episodes.

It is not without other flaws. Some of its dialogue is ripe in the way of any of these shows. Almost every character has a moment — some have several — where they reach for a door handle before withdrawing their hand, turning on their heels and giving an unprompted audition monologue to fit the moment. 

You know the kind of thing, a speech that starts with “when I was a kid …” and manages to begin as something their grandma once told them, and ends as a curiously apposite life lesson for anyone trapped in a supernatural prison town threatened by flesh-eating monsters.

And yet ... it’s good. The acting adds nuance and texture to the absurd premise, the characters are well fleshed-out (unfortunately for some of them, this proves literally the case) and the balance between the show’s larger stakes and its smaller conundrums is masterfully pitched. Some shows end their first series with a bombshell revelation that turns the entire narrative on its head.

From does this about six times per episode, without ever upsetting the rhythm or stretching your enjoyment to breaking point. Arguably the best evidence of this is the obligatory ‘previously on’ segment. On all other shows, I skip these instantly since I can usually work out from their contents the entire makeup of the episode to follow. From doesn’t suffer from this problem, because it has so many nesting, possibly contradictory, mysteries, that I relish reminding myself of the 85 dangling enigmas that might be addressed in the hour to come.

Gah, I feel I might have lost you already. One flaw in recommending such a show is that TV viewers no longer have any faith that said mysteries will get any useful conclusion. Certainly, the spectre of Lost, and its resolute refusal to give its innumerable mysteries a satisfactory resolution, looms heavy. 

But even then, Lost had six seasons, 121 episodes and the full, unbreakable backing of its parent network to make the attempt.

Nowadays, TV shows are so frequently killed in the crib that placing your eggs in any televisual basket is a fool’s errand. Already this year, two big Netflix shows I enjoyed, Half Bad and Lockwood & Co, were cancelled mere weeks after their first, perfectly charming, series had landed. 

Often, the first time I hear about a new show is when I see an announcement they’ve been cancelled, written as a Notes app apology to fans by their stricken creators. The obvious human reaction is to simply refuse to get invested in such shows until they’re a few seasons in. This however is a Catch-22, since streaming services make their commissioning decisions based on how many people watch them the first week they’re out.

This, I find is the true horror. Streaming TV has trapped its viewers in a strange facsimile of a place we once knew, overseen by forces we don’t yet understand. It kind of reminds me of a show I really think you should watch, if I could only remember the name of it.