From HBO Latino’s Like Water for Chocolate to Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Amazon’s The House of the Spirits, Spanish-language magical realism is having its television moment. But the genre has proven difficult for Anglophone shows to crack.
Look no further than Apple TV, on a creative hot streak for several years in a variety of tones and topics, but a graveyard of less-than-successful stabs at magical realism or magical realism-adjacent programming, with titles ranging from The Big Door Prize to Government Cheese to High Desert to The Changeling.
Depending on whether you apply the classification to Widow’s Bay — if you accept that curses are magical, it surely counts — Apple TV’s first magical realist triumph isn’t an Apple TV original at all, but rather the BBC Two acquisition Small Prophets, premiering on the streamer this week.
I would also argue that Small Prophets may be the finest show to hit Apple this year, though that superlative would also probably depend on your feelings about Widow’s Bay.
Written, directed and co-starring Mackenzie Crook and sure to appeal to fans of Crook’s similarly droll, ultimately more grounded comedy Detectorists, Small Prophets is sad and funny and whimsical, an unlikely piece of alchemy that comes together as simultaneously wild and understatedly humane.
It’s a low-key show, but one that succeeds in countless ways that could have easily gone astray and turned silly or twee, carried in no small part by a beautiful starring performance from Pearce Quigley and a breakout turn from co-star Lauren Patel.
Quigley, a prolific character actor most recently seen memorably as Gospel John on Netflix’s The Gentlemen, plays Michael Sleep, a Manchester-area man sleepwalking through an unremarkable life.
Michael has a day-to-day routine that includes bickering with his nosy neighbor (Jon Pointing’s Clive) about the maintenance on his cul de sac home, bickering with his boss (Crook’s Gordon) at a home goods chain store, and visiting with his father (Michael Palin‘s Brian) at his retirement home. Otherwise, he’s generally alone.
It hasn’t always been like this for Michael. Seven years earlier, his long-term girlfriend Clea stepped out on Christmas Eve and her car was found at a nearby bridge. She, however, was never found, leaving Michael with a house — her house, not his — full of boxes, an untouched living room still decorated for Christmas, and some big questions.
Sensing that his son is trapped in limbo, Brian brings up the homunculi, tiny humanoid creatures who, when raised in jars, are capable of answering any question and even predicting the future. Michael always thought that the homunculi were a quirky bedtime story, but Brian insists that his notebooks contain the recipe for generating and nurturing homunculi.
Michael begins the involved homunculi-producing process, wholly unconvinced that his aging father still has his wits about him. But Michael is out of other ideas, at a literal and metaphorical dead-end. He gets an assist from Kacey (Patel), an unmotivated young co-worker whose limited amount of curiosity is piqued by Michael’s commitment to antisocial behavior.
The clock may be ticking, because Clea’s brother (Paul Kaye’s Roy) is determined to finally sell her house, all while suspicious strangers are poking around with their own questions about Clea.
Leaving the homunculi out of the equation, which you cannot do, Small Prophets is a show in which oddities abound, mostly unremarked upon at the fringes of the mundane. There are the local kids who may have staged a daylight armed car robbery; the cheery, constantly gardening neighbor (Shola Adewusi’s Olive) ever poisoning the imaginary pests that probably aren’t attacking her plastic plants; the sullen teen in a hoodie perpetually circling the cul de sac on his bicycle; the maniacally giggling co-worker (Ed Kear’s Brigham) fixated on Michael. It’s a collection of eccentrics and eccentricities that’s always threatening to tip over into outlandishly or unsustainably weird, but never does.
Much of that sense of muted control is attributable to Crook, who might still be best known for wiry supporting turns in The Office and Game of Thrones before he established himself as a tremendous television creator and director. I was constantly aware of the subtle and unpretentious details filling the periphery of every frame, curiosities and anomalies that, treated with a heavier hand, could have descended into something more overtly oddball or bizarre. Instead, as was the case with Detectorists, Crook maintains admirable restraint, right up until the end of the season — a second season has already been ordered — when things come together in well-earned chaos.
Crook knows that if anybody in the show acknowledged how abnormal the unfolding events were/are, Small Prophets would likely collapse into a wacky heap, so it’s all treated as very ordinary, even when the circumstances are anything but.
Quigley’s own sense of economy is a perfect match.
Michael is a sarcastic grouch, unwilling to suffer the various fools in his life. But however many things the character says that are objectively funny, Quigley never acts like he’s delivering punchlines. He’s simply someone who has dedicated all of his patience to his father — who is flirting with dementia — and a mystery he has resigned himself to never solve, with none left for anybody else. Quigley looks like a mad prophet, which is central to his terrifying guest role in The Gentlemen, but Michael is melancholic, not mad. It’s a special performance from an actor who has never received this sort of spotlight before.
Despite the demographic gaps between them, Patel makes Kacey into a plausibly simpatico foil for Michael. Crook leaves many holes in Kacey’s backstory — perhaps too many — though it’s easy enough to understand that she recognizes a lonely kindred spirit in Michael. They forge a friendship that is, like everything else in the show, unforced and increasingly sweet without even a trace of anything sketchy or saccharine.
It’s a great supporting ensemble, one in which even the outsized performances — Adewusi is aggressively endearing, while Kear starts broad and adjusts his volume as he goes — are never designed to steal scenes. Heaven knows Palin could steal a scene from almost any actor in circulation, but his matter-of-fact approach to all of Brian’s strangeness suggests a man whose imagination was once boundless, forced by age into a life that’s become all too contained.
Across six half-hour episodes, Small Prophets escalates in ways that are always believable and never predictable. The audience isn’t being asked to solve the mystery of Clea’s disappearance — just to invest in Michael’s circumstances as the puzzlements and peculiarities mount. It isn’t a show filled with big laughs or swells of emotion, though I laughed hard a few times and got choked up here and there. But it’s one that produces a smile of amused recognition early on, without ever letting up.
Despite the story’s scale and the show’s title, the profits it offers viewers willing to buy into its idiosyncrasies are anything but small.
