Beautiful, Promising, and Disappointing I wanted to love Lovecraft Country. Jordan Peele, Misha Green, period horror, the occult -- it all sounded great. And you know, a lot of it is. The cast is extremely talented, the cinematography, particularly in the first two episodes, is gorgeous, and some of the musical choices are perfection. The show, however, is a giant mess.
Oftentimes things just happen. You're dropped into an episode and it feels like you missed an episode, but that episode doesn't exist. People do things without any particular motivation. Characters appear whose backstories are told in clumsily done exposition -- only for you to find out they're sort of irrelevant anyways. And those musical choices that are sometimes perfection -- other times you get jarringly out of place music that doesn't work at all for the time period or the action onscreen.
The show delves into certain areas of racial politics with great nuance, and then at other times has cops behave like caricatures out of Dolemite movies. The tone is all over the place. Sometimes we're meant to be scared, and then in the next scene people dance around to the Jeffersons theme like it's a comedy. There's a lot that's delightful to it, but also a lot that's just emblematic of a show in which no one seems to have focused the vision of the creator. There's a wonderful episode that takes place in Korea -- it's beautifully shot, and as a self contained piece, lovely, but it does absolutely nothing to advance the plot of the series as a whole.
The biggest weaknesses of the show are the CGI, which looks noticeably and oddly cheap at times, and uses of historical figures like Emmett Till that felt oddly exploitative. Where Watchmen masterfully used the Tulsa Race riot to frame an entire season of drama, Lovecraft Country trots out historical figures like winking nods, often using them to justify torturing characters in the show in the manner in which those figures were killed. You can see where the creators were going, but it just feels off.
Is it worth a watch? Yes. Particularly for the first couple of episodes. But after that it spins wildly off the rails, never really delivering on the promise of the beginning of the series.