The past few years have brought harrowing stories of streaming platforms shelving completed projects as tax write-offs. This time, at least, there’s a happy ending for the YA series The Spiderwick Chronicles, which was originally made for Disney+, only to be scrapped as a cost-cutting strategy and sold to Roku instead.
Based on Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black’s bestselling fantasy novels about a family who move into their old ancestral home and discover a hidden world of magical creatures, Spiderwick certainly would’ve made sense as a companion to Disney’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (Both are based on mid-aughts book series that gained massive popularity in the post-Harry Potter publishing landscape.) On Roku, however, it gets to be an uneven but mostly charming flagship series for the free, ad-supported streamer, which debuts all eight episodes on April 19.
Spiderwick enthusiasts should know that creator Aron Eli Coleite has taken some fairly drastic liberties with the source material—including aging up its twin protagonists from 9-year-olds to teenagers and giving its mystical baddies far more human motivations. In place of the Amblin-inspired whimsy of the 2008 big-screen adaptation starring Freddie Highmore, Coleite’s series tries to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer for tweens. In practice, however, that’s a high-water mark the show can only occasionally reach.
Unquestionably, the best thing about the series is Christian Slater as the central villain Mulgarath, a bloodthirsty ogre who disguises himself as a charming small-town father in order to hatch a plan that’ll allow him to consume his neighbors in one fell swoop. Not since Heathers has Slater had so much fun disguising nihilistic sociopathy behind self-effacing charisma. And while the series as a whole fails to recapture the comedic spark that characterized Buffy’s dialogue, Slater knows just how to camp it up in a kids’-show way that’ll keep adults equally entertained.
The other place where Spiderwick successfully pulls from the Buffy playbook is in grounding its fantastical elements in the trials and tribulations of young adulthood—from teenage mental health struggles to the microaggressions a Black family might face when moving to a predominantly white small town in Michigan. Though Spiderwick mostly keeps things PG in tone, it gives each of its central characters thorny issues to grapple with. Newly single mom Helen Grace (Parenthood’s Joy Bryant) is desperate to get clinical help for her troubled son Jared (Lyon Daniels) and his “oppositional defiance disorder.” That puts pressure on Jared’s twin brother Simon (Noah Cottrell) and big sister Mallory (Mychala Lee) to hold it together as the “good kids,” even as their outward reliability hides emotional struggles of their own.
The problem is, the success of Spiderwick's earnest family drama makes it more glaring how much it doesn’t work as a fantastical adventure story. For a show about kids uncovering a hidden world of fairies and goblins, it’s almost comical how little we actually see of that magical world in action. Sure, it’s a canonical detail from the books that creatures like Thimbletack the bogart (voiced by Jack Dylan Grazer) can turn invisible at will, but it quickly becomes clear that invisibility is way more of a budgetary restriction than an artistic choice.
Lyon Daniels.
RokuIn fact, with few magical creatures who don’t appear in human disguises, The Spiderwick Chronicles is almost entirely missing the sense of fairy-tale wonder that characterized its source material. That hurts the show’s pacing as the season struggles to figure out how to plot around that gaping hole in its center. Episode 2 briefly introduces the idea that the Grace kids must search the town to uncover hidden pages from their great-great-grandfather’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, but that adventure-of-the-week format is swiftly dropped in favor of fractured subplots that never really cohere into something greater than the sum of their parts. Only a few welcome appearances from the Grace kids’ great aunt Lucinda (an enchanting Charlayne Woodard) manage to blend the show’s family focus with a genuine sense of wonder.
Still, between the Grace family’s endearing warmth and Slater’s delectable villainy, there’s a decent amount to enjoy in this new take on The Spiderwick Chronicles. And while Disney+ likely would’ve released the show weekly, Roku is smart to drop it in a bingeable format, where it’s easier to breeze through the lows and appreciate the highs. For families who’ve finished Percy Jackson and are looking for something to watch next, The Spiderwick Chronicles is a worthy enough follow-up. Just don’t expect too much in the way of bona fide magic.
