The NOS4A2 premiere builds very slowly and lacks bite

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AMC was a niche cable channel back in the day before it went mainstream with The Walking Dead bringing millions of new viewers to the channel and giving the Powers That Be an opportunity to try new things like Preacher, Into the Badlands and Lodge 49. While successful enough to garner multiple seasons, none of them struck a chord with viewers like that zombie series did. And it revitalized a dead genre as well with new zombie TV shows and movies popping up like the undead. But all good things muct come to an end … no matter how long the network keeps milking it … and it’s time to try a new genre. AMC did find itself with a hit with the import A Discovery of Witches, which includea vampires and now vampires are the hot monster du jour (and let’s not forget one of Preacher‘s main characters is also a vampire).

Hoping to tap that vein, AMC now brings us a new twist on the vampire genre with NOS4A2, based on the novel by Joe Hill. Of course the title is a play on Nosferatu, considered the first vampire movie, but that’s about all the two projects have in common. The premiere of NOS4A2 is saddled with a lot of world-building and character development … so it’s a bit slow going. The episode opens with a young boy, Daniel Moore, being lured out of his house in Here, Iowa late one night by a car playing Christmas music very loudly (but can only Daniel hear it?). The car is also filled with presents … and a creepy old man who we will later learn is named Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto, the biggest name here). Unfortunately, Manx’s assistant Mr. Ives bungles the abduction by killing Daniel’s mother on the front lawn, as well as her gentleman caller inside the house … and he pays dearly for his errors. Manx, however, promises Daniel that he’s taking him to a place where no one will ignore him: Christmasland. During the very, very long car ride — so long they don’t reach Christmasland by the end of the hour — something is happening to Daniel while Manx begins to look much, much younger.

We’re also introduced to the McQueen family of Haverhill, Massachusetts, pretty much a stereotypical broken family with a warring father and mother with a teenaged daughter caught in the middle, being lured into her own personal hell of joining her mother’s housecleaning service instead of furthering her education. All Vic wants to do is graduate and go to art school, but mom Linda doesn’t see that as affordable and student loans will only put Vic in debt for twenty years. Her dad Chris is a lot more supportive but he also has a habit of losing his temper and smacking Linda around. Even so, Vic’s biggest fear is that her dad will leave, trapping Vic with her mother and a life of cleaning other people’s homes. Including the home of her best friend Willa, whose mother seems to know more of what’s going on with Linda and Chris than Vic is willing to admit.

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Vic is very good at her artwork though, producing a charcoal drawing of an old covered bridge … which she learns was actually torn down fifteen years earlier. So is Vic going crazy or is something else at play here? During one of her parents’ fights over a lost credit card, Vic takes off on her dirt bike and heads to the bridge where inside she sees her friend Willa’s name spraypainted on the wall. Later Vic goes to a party at Willa’s and Willa’s mother gives Vic the missing credit card. Was the bridge guiding her or was it just a weird coincidence?

Another parental fight ensues over Chris’ lost watch. This time Vic heads to the bridge and drives through, ending up outside a local diner. Going inside, a server hands her the missing watch. Vic is totally freaking out but she makes the return journey back through the covered bridge and after she’s back where she started, she turns to find the bridge has vanished. What does it all mean? And how are the events in Iowa and Massachusetts connected? That’s a good question because right now the two stories don’t appear to have an intersection point. Perhaps Manx will tune in to Vic’s feelings of being alone and a loser just as he did with Daniel. The key seems to be the radio in his car.

The premiere of NOS4A2 was a bit slow-going. The more interesting part of the story certainly is Manx and his mysterious Christmasland, and whatever he’s doing to Daniel (and Manx may not be a traditional bloodsucking vampire). The McQueen stuff is a bit cliché right now because, surprise, Chris did end up leaving his family before the end of the episode. There is one other interesting character back in Iowa, a young woman named Maggie Leigh who has a magical Scrabble tiles bag (she can stick her arm way down inside that thing) and pull out tiles to help her help the police solve crimes, even if the police think she just gets lucky with her guesses. But she does pull out the tiles that spell THE WRAITH, which is the type of car Manx drives, and THE BRAT which is Vic’s nickname. So perhaps these two stories will eventuall intersect but they’d better make it snappy since this is just a ten-episode season.

By the way, if you’ve read Hill’s novel, there are major plot points in the books that do not appear anywhere in the first episode.

NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10:00 PM on AMC.

Did you tune in to NOS4A2? What did you think of the premiere? Sound off in the comments below!

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