At the polite urging of Peacock, I can’t tell you much about their new thriller-type-thing, Teacup.
I can’t tell you what the series is actually about, even though it’s based Robert McCammon’s novel Stinger, so that information is easy enough to find if you care. I can’t tell you what happens to most of the main characters, though I’m not sure under what circumstances I would have been tempted to do so anyway. I can’t tell you about the very cheesy piece of special effects that inspired the show’s rainbow-y title treatment — and, like, fair enough, though nobody will actually be excited by the discovery when it arrives.
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Teacup
One thing I feel OK telling you, without revealing what character says it, to whom it’s said or the overall context in which the words are uttered, is that the last line of the season’s eighth and final episode is, “We’re not going anywhere until you tell us what the fuck is going on.”
It’s a sentiment that 99 percent of viewers will have already uttered to themselves as both a demand and as a statement of fact, since this is one of those shows that absolutely grinds itself to a halt in order to avoid coming out and directly articulating specific narrative details, so as to withhold them for the majority of the season. That choice is infuriating but also makes perfect sense, since Teacup becomes dumber and dumber the more breadcrumbs it scatters.
Most of those are delivered in the 51-minute fifth episode, a flashback-heavy slog that abandons the reasonably brisk pacing that was previously the drama’s main asset. That marked the point for me at which Teacup went from tantalizing if never emotionally engaging to thoroughly monotonous.
So, within the confines of what I can say without spoiling things, what is Teacup about?
Well, adapted by Ian McCulloch (Yellowstone), it begins with a woman frantically roaming through a forest, hands zip-tied together. She’s muttering a mixture of garbled words, the most discernible of which are, “Murder Marker.”
Over at a nearby farm, we meet the Chenoweths. Maggie, a veterinarian who we’re repeatedly told is cool under pressure, is giving son Arlo (Caleb Dolden) an object lesson in foreshadowing/ham-handed symbolism, catching a wasp or hornet against a window using a TEACUP! She makes the kid listen to the angry insect smack against the porcelain and tells him, “It’s a tempest in a teacup.” Soon, their lives will be a tempest in a teacup. That literal teacup and other observations about teacups make recurring appearances until the writers finally just get bored and move on.
In addition to Arlo, Maggie has daughter Meryl (Émilie Bierre), who can quote Romeo & Juliet and knows details about cow stomachs, and husband James (Scott Speedman), who is in the doghouse for predictable reasons. James’ mother Ellen (Kathy Baker) is living with them. She has MS. Something weird is happening with their animals.
Enter the Shanleys, the family next door — husband Ruben (Chaske Spencer), wife Valeria (Diany Rodriguez) and teenage son Nicholas (Luciano Leroux). Their animals are acting strange, too. They each have maybe one personality trait apiece. To wit, Ruben is intense, Valeria is in the doghouse for predictable reasons and Nicholas likes telling bad jokes.
They’re joined by Don (Boris McGiver), a neighbor who I think is supposed to be “conservative,” because he says something sarcastic about COVID. I assume his animals are acting strange, too.
Fairly quickly, they’re all trapped on the Chenoweth property. Phones aren’t working. Their cars won’t start. And if they stray too far … bad things happen. There’s evil afoot that can take any form or inhabit any body.
For the first couple of installments, directed by Evan Katz and Chloe Acuno (James Wan, whose involvement Peacock is selling aggressively, executive produces but does not direct), Teacup is occasionally creepy and insinuating. Because one line of dialogue says so, the story is set outside of Atlanta. But its bucolic setting is designed to be a Rural Anywhere, one in which the neighbors know each other but not closely, and yet can come together when their animals start acting strange. It feels like an instigation for something allegorical, except that — with apologies to that one line about COVID — this series isn’t really saying anything specifically interesting about our fraying sense of contemporary communal life.
It’s the shape of a parable without the meaning — just like everybody in it has the shape of characters without the dimension, and the plot has the shape of literally countless horror and sci-fi TV shows and movies without ever feeling specific and distinctive. (Eventually it’s mostly just ripping off The Thing, which saves me the trouble of listing other inspirations that might be spoiler-y.) It’s a puzzle not because the characters are trying to figure things out, but because the creators are being evasive and hoping viewers will nod and play along.
Though none of the actors are bad — Strahovski, Spencer, Dolden and Bierre are, in fact, getting impressive value out of minimal material — the mystery upstages any human element at all. At one point in a later episode, two characters list the body count so far and I had to take a pause because I didn’t remember a single meaningful death. You don’t really root for or against anybody, only for somebody, anybody, to just put their foot down and announce, “We’re not going anywhere until you tell us what the fuck is going on.”
A lot could be forgiven or obscured within Teacup if it were just scary. It aggressively is not. The simple image of the mysterious figure in a vintage gas mask is potent, but once more characters appear wearing that gas mask, there’s nothing else to it. While I completely get why these people occasionally use them (and why somebody must’ve hoped the COVID undercurrents would imply depth), the practicality is one of countless details that the characters onscreen simply accept. Viewers are apparently expected to do the same, especially after the endless fifth chapter when the writers practically throw their hands up and say, “Look, we told you two or three things and gave you several nicknames for stuff that we think are cool, why isn’t that enough?”
There is one disturbing thing that happens as a consequence of the central situation that I can’t spoil. When it happens the first time, it’s gross and entertaining (and a cheat, for reasons I won’t go into). When it happens the second time, it’s disturbing-looking, but the visceral response is gone. When it happens a third time, the disinterest is so complete that it must set some sort of record for general desensitization.
If the last line of the first season weren’t the most damning thing one could say about Teacup, perhaps I would need to point to its use of Linda Ronstadt’s cover of Tom Petty’s “The Waiting” in the finale. It isn’t that the waiting is the hardest part. It’s that for eight, mostly half-hour chapters, the waiting is the ONLY part. Maybe you’ll be able to take it on faith or take it to the heart, as this series practically demands, but I ran out of interest.
