Teacup begins so intriguingly that one worries it might have an M. Night Shyamalan problem—namely, the inability to satisfyingly explain or resolve a tantalizing mystery. Fortunately, Ian McCulloch’s eight-episode horror series (executive produced by Saw and The Conjuring mastermind James Wan, and inspired by Robert R. McCammon’s 1988 novel Stinger) handles its inexplicable phenomenon by looking to past genre classics, on which it puts a loopy spin that makes it at once familiar and distinctive.
Premiering Oct. 10 on Peacock, Teacup consistently expands the scope of its story (and its central crisis) all the way to a finale that suggests there’s even more to tell. It’s an out-there thriller that rehashes and remixes to engaging B-movie effect.
On a remote Georgia farm that doubles as the site of her veterinarian clinic, Maggie (Yvonne Strahovski) shows her son Arlo (Caleb Dolden) how to catch a bee with a teacup and a piece of paper. This demonstration is a metaphor for the predicament to come, although before that begins, McCulloch swiftly delineates his protagonists and their fraught relationships.
Maggie is currently at odds with husband James (Scott Speedman) and needs to mend fences with her mother-in-law Ellen (Kathy Baker), a cheery woman who listens to classic rock while smoking weed to alleviate the hand tremors brought on by multiple sclerosis. This clan additionally includes older daughter Meryl (Émilie Bierre), as well as owns a variety of animals that, at present, have suddenly started acting strangely.
Scott Speedman, Caleb Dolden, Emilie Bierre, and Yvonne Strahovski
PeacockThis isn’t an isolated incident, as they learn when their neighbor Ruben (Chaske Spencer) and his wife Valeria (Diany Rodriguez) and teen son Nicholas (Luciano Leroux) visit with a horse that’s bizarrely injured itself. At the moment of their arrival, Maggie and company are coping with the sudden disappearance of Arlo, who they don’t realize has wandered into the surrounding woods in search of a wayward goat. What they also don’t know, but which Teacup has revealed during a prologue, is that the forest is inhabited by a frantic Hispanic woman whose wrists are zip-tied, face is bloody, and mouth won’t stop muttering gibberish (in English and Spanish) about a “murder maker.” She’s obviously fleeing something, and the nearby outline of a growling feral dog implies that it’s ferocious and hungry.
(Warning: Minor spoilers follow.)
As their four-legged companions go crazy and their lights flicker and go out along with their cellular service, these figures struggle to devise an answer for this sudden onslaught of oddness. At the same time, Arlo encounters the woman in the woods, whose name is Carmen (Adelina Anthony) and who leans over him and howls, her mouth opening wide to begin an invisible transferal process that culminates with rainbow streaks passing across his pupils.
Boris McGiver and Scott Speedman
PeacockCovered in blood that isn’t his own, Arlo returns home, where everyone’s been joined by AR-15-toting neighbor Donald (Boris McGiver) and his wife Claire. A scarier guest, however, is a stranger who turns up on the road leading to their house. Wearing a gas mask and having already drawn a line around their property in blue spray paint, this man uses a dry erase board to tell them “Don’t Cross the Line” and “Don’t Trust Anyone.” They don’t believe him, but when Don is attacked by a feral dog that, upon being tossed over this boundary, dies in unthinkable fashion, they heed his warning, even once he departs.
Teacup’s characters are as trapped as Maggie’s bee, and McCulloch teases the true nature of these circumstances while elucidating their tense dynamics. Maggie is furious at James over his infidelity, which she’s yet to learn was with Valeria—a bombshell that strains both couples’ marital bonds. Nicholas has feelings for Meryl that she reciprocates, and Ellen is trying her best to keep things together even as they threaten to spiral out of control. That proves to be an impossible task, at least in the short term, since Claire responds to this madness by opting to walk home. When Don can’t reach her in time to warn her about the line, she suffers a grisly fate that underscores to everyone that they’re now prisoners of an unspecified force.
However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for McCulloch’s series, whose story soon involves the gas-masked man, McNab (Rob Morgan), who knows quite a bit about their dilemma and, better still, a potential way to cope with it, as well as a cop (Bill Heck) who claims to want to help these locals with their situation. Ably directed by Evan Katz, John Hyams, Chloe Okuno, and Kevin Tancharoen, the proceedings are taut and tangled, and always shrewd about doling out just enough information to keep viewers hooked without laying its cards on the table.
When it eventually does make things clearer, Teacup outs itself as a riff on John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing by way of 1987’s cult favorite The Hidden. Nonetheless, it manages to put enough of a twist on those predecessors’ formulas to remain gripping and unpredictable.
Yvonne Strahovski
PeacockStrahovski is the lynchpin of Teacup, and her formidable presence as Maggie—colored by anger, hurt, and resentment at a deceitful husband who views her poise as “cold”—provides the series with a foundation upon which it can rest its insanity. The Dexter and The Handmaid’s Tale star has rarely been better, and her antagonistic rapport with Speedman expands the material’s portrait of loyalty, deception, and the push-pull between what’s seen and what’s known. The rest of the cast is similarly strong, led by Morgan in a role that shouldn’t work—McNab is a plot device designed to afford clarity about this menace—and yet does thanks to his captivating work.
With most of its episodes running less than 40 minutes, the show is an efficient supernatural beast, and if it isn’t as brutally ruthless as it could have been, it has no qualms about indulging in the grim and gruesome. Two-thirds of the way through its first season, Teacup appears to run out of steam, stuck replaying old hits in a modestly new way. With an enticing conclusion, though, it revitalizes itself, hinting at a larger world (and catastrophe) waiting to be explored—something that, given its effective maiden run, will hopefully materialize sooner rather than later.
