I forget who it was that I initially saw on Twitter lamenting that Netflix had a new series from the guy who made Attack the Block and wasn’t hyping it sufficiently. This turns out to be Lockwood & Co., which is based on a series of YA books I had never heard of. I wouldn’t ordinarily go out of my way to watch this sort of thing, but Kate and SteelyKid were away for the weekend, so I needed to stay up slightly later than usual for me, and I threw on the premiere to help keep me awake. It was enjoyable enough that I watched the rest of it over the last several days, making it the rare timely binge of a series for me.
The series is set in some indeterminate recent-ish past (nobody has mobile phones, but everybody acts fairly modern otherwise) in an alternate UK where ghosts exploded back into the world dramatically a generation or two before. This took a huge toll on the population before they figured out how to contain the supernatural— they’re repelled by iron, salt, running water, and bright light— and continues to cause problems for society. Incursions of ghosts are dealt with by teams of agents who, because this is a YA series, have to be teens— a small number of young people are born with the talent to see and hear ghosts, but the talent fades out as they reach adulthood. The agencies that directly confront ghosts are mostly private companies, the largest one (the Fittes Agency) being a massive glitzy corporation, and the whole enterprise is loosely overseen by a government agency, DEPRAC (I can’t be bothered to look up what that stands for), who take responsibility for destroying the “sources” that ghosts are tied to, once they’re identified and contained by agents.
The show follows Lucy Carlyle, a young woman who has an exceptional talent as a “listener” (she mostly hears ghosts), raised in a part of the country that I don’t think is named but is probably instantly identifiable to actual UKadians by the fairly distinctive accents of the actors in the early scenes. She’s recruited by a local agency, and receives basic training, but one of her earlier missions goes disastrously wrong due to the fecklessness of the adult supervising he team, leaving her best friend “ghost-locked” in a vegetative state. She flees to London and attempts to find work with various big agencies, but is turned away everywhere until she stumbles across the eponymous Lockwood and Company. Which is just two other teenagers: Anthony Lockwood, whose stately family home serves as their base of operation (and collateral for the loans that funded the launch of the agency), and the more bookish George Karim, who was previously a research agent for Fittes.
This is, of course, kind of a ridiculously contrived set-up, but you got that from “YA novel series.” It actually plays surprisingly well, largely due to the performance of Cameron Chapman as Lockwood, who successfully projects the unusual level of charisma and bravado needed to make it seem marginally plausible that other people in the story would let him get away with this. That’s usually the failure point in the YA-book-to-screen-adaptation process— novels can get away with a lot more because they put you in the heads of the protagonists, who more or less by definition find their situation plausible. It’s harder to find actors who can carry that off in live action, and Chapman does it really well, particularly the scene about halfway through where he has to convince a crowd of laborers that he and his agency can deal with the haunted cemetery that they’ve been hired to clear. Ruby Stokes as Lucy and Ali Hadji-Heshmati as George are also very good, but Chapman really makes it work. (This is apparently his screen debut, so good for him…)
The eight episodes of the series cover bout two books’ worth of plot, with Lucy, George and Lockwood settling in as a found family, and beginning to uncover a darker conspiracy around the nature of ghosts and the origin of “The Problem” (the wonderfully (and British-ly) understated term for the whole supernatural infestation). It ends in a reasonably satisfying place, though the very final shot is a blatant “Please, Netflix, Give Us a Second Season” cliffhanger.
I wouldn’t call this the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen— as noted above, the premise is more than a little ridiculous— but it was solidly enjoyable streaming television, with very good performances from pretty much everyone in the cast (a couple of junior Fittes agents are a little dodgy, but those are very small parts…). It was a good light diversion, and I hope Netflix does give them a second season.
This is a pretty lightweight post, I know, but it’s been that kind of week. If you like this, or just want to see what I would produce that isn’t as lightweight, here’s a button:
And if you have thoughts about this series or other things I ought to watch on streaming video, the comments will be open: