Apple TV+'s TheBigDoorPrize, starring Chris O'Dowd, has an intriguing premise that regrettably never makes the most of its own potential. Our review:
What is your life’s potential? Not your job, not your hobbies, but your potential. It is an existential question in an almost cosmic sense that carries with it a great weight. In The Big Door Prize, the new Apple TV+ series based on the novel of the same by author M.O. Walsh, an ensemble cast of characters are confronted with this very question to middling results.
COLLIDER VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT This all begins with Dusty who is living a life that is ordinary though unsatisfying. Don’t let it be mistaken, he doesn’t have any significant troubles. He has a family, works as a teacher, and generally seems like a cheery dude as he goes around greeting his fellow residents with a smile.
Characters deal with repressed tragedies and painful contradictions that are profoundly human. Unfortunately, at the same time, there is much that feels oddly stiff to the entire affair. Some of the stiltedness is certainly meant to be part of the humor, but that itself is only sporadically realized.
The series isn’t ever obnoxious, playing everything oddly safe in a way that could be read as a pointed reflection of the small-town tranquility that can become suffocating when it is all you have ever known. We see this in Dowd’s performance where he seems to be putting on a happy face for those around him, his students, family, and friends, though it all feels hollow in a way the series doesn’t quite have a handle on.
By the time you get to the end of the ten episodes in this first season, you’re left wondering what it was all even for. The characters could be charming, but there is only the lightest engagement with the full scope of the story. Without giving anything away, this is intentional, as it ends on a cliffhanger with the promise of more to come.
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