The Midnight Club
It was 2018 when I first heard about Mike Flanagan. He wrote and directed the most perfectly modernized and expanded version of The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix. It was the first time that I really felt that someone understood what Shirley Jackson was trying to do, and yes, that meant no Owen Wilson being decapitated I'm glad to say. He followed this up with The Haunting of Bly Manor two years later, making an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw that was actually watchable. I have issues with that Henry James story, to be sure, but Mike Flanagan made me forget them. Everyone wanted to know what classic piece of "house" horror literature was to follow, and it did take awhile to find out we'd be getting some Edgar Allan Poe with The Fall of the House of Usher, but he tided us over with the original Midnight Mass. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, it was announced he was adapting Christopher Pike's The Midnight Club. While the premise seemed dark, a hospice for terminally ill kids, I had faith in Flanagan. Faith in him and his stable of actors. Because like all the great directors, or like Ryan Murphy, Flanagan has drawn to him a troupe. I could just say Rahul Kohli and leave it at that, but I won't. OK, I will. I seriously only need Rahul to be happy. The problem is Flanagan envisioned this show as being a two season arc but he wasn't guaranteed the second season and then he went and signed a massive deal with Netflix's rival Amazon and that coupled with low ratings meant the show was cancelled and nothing was resolved. He thankfully posted what he had planned to achieve over two seasons and seeing as the pacing was so glacial he could have easily done what he wanted to in one. I mean, seriously, it took me months just to finish this first season and that took a lot of willpower. This series just had something missing. It was a disconnect. Like it caught the nineties vibe so well, but it was all surface. If you looked too closely you saw the cracks. You might have been brought to tears by a certain Green Day song, but when you realize they're somehow singing it two years too early you're taken out of the moment. And if you get distracted by Igby Rigney's clenched jaw head-tilt smile that perfectly channels Christian Slater just remember you could actually be watching Christian Slater instead of his and Ethan Embry's love child. I don't know what could have made it work. But the fatal flaw was trying to have each actor do too much. They have their main characters and then the characters they play in the stories they tell. Each episode does it's own horror trope, from Japanese horror to Black Swan psychological to teen serial killer to noir. And the way these stories within the story were told seemed a little too not just gimmicky but contrived. Like it was amateur dramatics in high school. In fact for some reason I'm thinking of the dream sequence in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season four episode "Restless." It was like that level of bad acting but not on purpose. And don't get me started on how the bad wigs just added to the problem. This is easily Mike Flanagan's weakest show and I think the reason is it comes off as amateurish. This is the first project he has done based on material for a younger audience and I just don't think he knows how to write for that audience yet.
This has been one strange year for fans of television. What with the strikes as I type this we don't even know if there will be an Emmy Awards Broadcast. Sure they say sometime in the new year, but I wouldn't trust studios, networks, or streaming services who won't even pay their employees a living wage. Seriously, just pay them already!* I mean, seriously, look at this past year, look at all the amazing shows, and get it into your heads that none of this would have been possible without the writers and actors. The losses you're taking are costing you more than if you were to just pay them. Now, to get off my soapbox, let's celebrate the wonderful shows that were adapted from books this year. I mean, we had the big fantasy epics from George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien. We had the classics reinterpreted, from Tom Jones to Great Expectations to Dangerous Liaisons. We had the spooky and the kooky, from Lockwood and Co. to Wednesday to The Midnight Club. And these are just the shows I got around to watching! There were so many adaptations this year one has to wonder a little if there are any original ideas out there, but trust me, there are, just look to The Afterparty and Yellowjackets. Also, these adaptations showed what you could do with an open mind and a willingness to embrace the spirit of the source material but not be enslaved by it. There was rarely a show among these that I wouldn't be willing to watch again and again, like what I've done with the new season of Good Omens. So let's get this party started and join me in celebration of the wonders of adaptation.
