So…where are you from?
Main Cast: Harold Perrineau, Catalina Sandina Moreno
Created By: John Griffin
Take one wrong turn and you’re trapped. Not at all an unusual premise for a horror movie or TV series. The devil is all in the details to make the material interesting. FROM, a series from MGM+ (formerly Epix), makes some great moves and some questionable ones when setting up their dystopian village.
FROM is the story of a group of people, from all over the country, that finds themselves trapped in a small town. Each car encounters a tree blocking a remote road. The occupants, trying to get around it, find themselves in a town with no way out. All roads lead back to where the entered.
That’s not all. This is not some tame village. At night, creatures come calling. They look like regular folks, but they would very much like to eviscerate the unwilling residents of this motley community.
We enter this hellscape with the Matthews family. Traveling in an RV, parents Jim (Eion Bailey) and Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Morena), accompanied by teenager Julia (Hannah Cheramy) and young son Ethan (Simon Webster), encounter that ill-fated tree. In an unusual twist, they also encounter another car. There is an accident, and now the town has six new residents, two of whom are badly injured.
We learn about the community that has formed here with Jim and Tabitha. How people stay safe at night and what happens when they get careless. Through flashback and other characters, we begin to unravel the secrets of this mysterious, deadly place.
I’m not going to say more – that takes the fun out of discovering each new revelation and tidbit of backstory. Suffice to say that there is a whole lot of danger and many unanswered questions in this town.
If you’ve seen LOST, you’ll recognize Harold Perrineau, who plays Sheriff Boyd Stevens. FROM borrows quite a bit (including executive producers) from that groundbreaking series. Nothing is as it seems here, with supernatural phenomena and unexplained connections around every corner.
In this first season we mostly meet everyone and learn how the community evolved into its current form. We get to know Boyd and his son Ellis (Corteon Moore) and meet Victor (Scott McCord), who has been in the town longer than anyone else. We see the monsters and the havoc they wreak, and we encounter far more questions than answers.
The Good
The premise here is twisty and complicated. Where is this place? How does it have electricity and water? What are the monsters? How should these people try and get home? It’s all interesting and complex enough to support a lot of seasons.
The characters are diverse and represent a lot of layers of humanity. There are saints and jerks, just like in every community. The townspeople are not just background, they represent the various ways human beings cope with uncertainty and fear.
FROM is definitely horror, but it isn’t terribly gratuitous in its gore. There’s plenty, but the cameras don’t linger and more is inferred than shown. The intentional focus on the community helps balance the jump scares with something more relatable.
The Bad
FROM is clearly a series with ambition. That’s not bad, but in its first season it asks too many questions and starts too many balls rolling. They’ll need to be careful as they move forward to balance the supernatural with human nature and the development of characters.
It should learn from the mistakes of LOST and not get so tangled in the weeds that nothing makes sense.
Some of the performances, particularly Perrineau as the sheriff, are very good. Others are a little stiff. I suspect this is a matter of the actors (and writers) settling into their roles. Some early rough spots are already smoothing out by the end of the season.
The Verdict
I absolutely want to see the second season of FROM. I’m intrigued by both the premise and the characters. I’m happy to overlook a few too many plot points with the hopes that they bring it back together.
My biggest issue is logistics. I was able to see the first season of FROM on Amazon Prime Video. But it’s not an Amazon show. If I want to keep watching it as it comes out, I’ll need to subscribe to MGM+ and that’s not happening.
Otherwise I’ll be waiting for the series to be complete and then sign up for a free MGM+ trial and binge the whole thing. We do what we must!
More Horror TV
IT (1990) ~ The Haunting of Bly Manor ~ The Haunting of Hill House
Sue reads a lot, writes a lot, edits a lot, and loves a good craft. She was deemed “too picky” to proofread her children’s school papers and wears this as a badge of honor. She is also proud of her aggressively average knitting skills She is the Editorial Director at Silver Beacon Marketing and an aspiring Crazy Cat Lady.
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