A beloved high school quarterback is fooling around with his secret girlfriend at her home. A sudden knock on the bedroom door startles them both. Petrified, the girl hustles her boyfriend into her closet, yelling, “Just a minute!” to her mother. The door opens, and a man in a scary mask attacks the girl, who tries to escape; her boyfriend jumps out of the closet to try and help. Both are kidnapped. Only the boy’s disappearance is reported to the police, and a pentagram is painted on his parents’ garage door. Later, the quarterback is found dead in a “ritualistic” killing.
So begins Peacock’s new comedy/thriller series “Hysteria!”, an homage to the Satanic Panic that gripped suburban America in the 1980s. Created by Matthew Scott Kane, whose sole previous writing credit is an ABC sci-fi series called “Stitchers,” the series checks off all the 1980s signifiers you might expect to find in a horror series this time of year: a cozy small town in Michigan (named Happy Hollow); a police chief trying to keep everyone calm while investigating the seeming surge of Satanism (Bruce Campbell plays Chief Dandridge); a maniacal Catholic mother, capitalizing on the spreading chaos to try and launch a culture war (Anna Camp is Tracy Whitehead; her character is about as aggravating as the skin condition for which she is named).
The ensemble also follows Linda and Gene Campbell (Julie Bowen and Nolan North, respectively), ordinary middle-class parents to 17-year-old Dylan (Emjay Anthony is 21 in real life but looks to be about 14 here), who, despite having two good friends in, and a band with, Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and Spud (Kezii Curtis), feels lonely and dismissed by his peers. I remain unsure why two of the series’ more interesting characters weren’t given surnames, but I digress.
In the infinite wisdom of the teenager with an undeveloped frontal lobe, Dylan sees the news report about the pentagram and decides to rebrand the band as a Satanic heavy metal outfit called Dethkrunch. And while this does make them more interesting—even drawing the attention of Dylan’s longtime crush, the unnervingly preppy Judith (Jessica Treska)—the townspeople only become more convinced, aided by Tracy’s righteous recriminations, that Dethkrunch opened a portal that invited the Devil into Happy Hollow. Simultaneously, Linda begins to feel possessed, haunted by strange rashes on her body, whipped around her house by unseen forces. None of this, unfortunately, is particularly scary.
“Hysteria!” tends to work best as a kind of “Stranger Things” rip-off, with a few dashes of “Friday Night Lights” and “The Flash.” Its surface-level treatment of the Satanic Panic keeps things moving, and that part of the series is fine—not great, not terrible, but fine. It starts to tip its hand a bit too much by the end of the fourth episode, but it’s when the writing attempts an analysis of generational trauma that “Hysteria!” falls flat. Conservative religious parents of any faith are indeed a horror story unto themselves; their love for their children is conditional, based on whether their progeny subscribe to the same beliefs. But the portrayal of Tracy’s trauma, which she then inflicts on her daughter Faith (Nikki Hahn), is so ham-fisted it practically feels like it belongs on a daytime soap instead. What should be shocking feels trite, and the flashbacks to Tracy’s adolescence seem like they were filmed with Vaseline on the camera lens.
The ensemble of actors also operates as though they are on completely different sets. As the story’s villain, Camp seems stuck doing a parody of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character. Leaning into such a person’s campiness (pun unintended) would make for far more innovative television. But “Hysteria!” cannot commit to a tone and fails to balance its various emotional notes, jumping from comedy to villainy without really letting anything breathe, which is saying something given that each episode is nearly an hour long. Further compounding the problem are Emjay Anthony and Nikki Hahn, who look far too young to play high school upperclassmen, and their performances are more reminiscent of Disney Channel programming.
Horror mainstay Bruce Campbell, to his credit, knows exactly why he was hired and seamlessly juggles an unruffled exterior with plenty of winks at the audience. Craig Cackowski, a terrific actor who shone on NBC’s “Community,” appears far too briefly. Still, by far the most engaging performer here is Kezii Curtis, whose wisecracking performance as Spud adds necessary dollops of humor and dovetails nicely with Dylan’s half-baked schemes and Jordy’s cynicism. And while the production design is about what you’d expect on a show set forty years ago, Paul Cha’s makeup shines, playing with color, depth, and design in refreshing ways.
Ultimately, “Hysteria!” isn’t frightening enough to be a horror series, nor wacky enough to be funny. It loses its freshness and voice by ensuring the presence of every 1980s horror trope. I can understand the appeal of releasing such a story now, given the efforts of conservative parents all over America spreading fear about gender identity and book bans. Still, the writing doesn’t push far enough to provide anything more than a passing parallel to modern-day anxieties. The Nahnatchka Khan-directed “Totally Killer” at least questioned and played with the ideology of 1980s horror, but “Hysteria!” is content to operate out of a fondness for jump scares and a playlist of the decade’s biggest hits.
Entire series screened for review. Now streaming on Peacock.
