When Apple announced its new version of Steven Spielberg's anthology series Amazing Stories in October 2017, it was the first acquisition for a streaming service that didn't yet have a name or launch date, and an indication that Apple was taking its impending entry into the streaming wars seriously. Fast forward more than two years later, and Amazing Stories arrives with virtually no fanfare, four months after Apple TV+ debuted with other, higher-profile shows. Initial executive producers Bryan Fuller and Hart Hanson left before delivering a single episode. Only five of the 10 episodes ordered are premiering starting today.
Apple only provided the series' first episode for critics to review, so maybe the next four installments will be more creative and exciting. As it stands, the opening episode, "The Cellar," is a warmed-over version of a creaky Twilight Zone or Outer Limits premise. It's bland and forgettable, although far from terrible. It's a basic time-travel love story that seems designed to appeal to Outlander fans, although there's nowhere near the romantic intensity achieved on the popular Starz drama. Instead we get mild passion between modern-day home-renovator Sam (Dylan O'Brien) and Evelyn (Victoria Pedretti), a young woman in 1919 who's been pushed into a marriage of convenience.
Along with his brother, Jacob (Micah Stock), Sam has been hired to renovate a run-down old house in rural Iowa. There, he stumbles across a hidden box with a vintage matchbook and a picture of a bride who looks strangely familiar to him. When a freak storm sets in, Sam takes refuge in the basement next to an old barometer, and as the air pressure drops, his ears start ringing and he looks up to find himself in the same house, 100 years earlier (it's another indication of Amazing Stories' delayed production and release schedule that this episode's present-day setting is 2019).
In 1919, the house was inhabited by Evelyn and her stern mother (Sasha Alexander), who insists on marrying Evelyn off to a humorless widower with two children. Evelyn, however, is a free spirit who surreptitiously listens to jazz records and dreams of being a singer. At first, Sam freaks her out, but she soon starts falling for this visitor from the future. And he begins to feel the same way, even as he's searching for a way to get, y'know, back to the future. He decides he needs to take Evelyn with him in order to give her a better life, but of course, things are not that easy.
Like CBS All Access' recent, mediocre Twilight Zone reboot, Amazing Stories basically doubles the running time of its episodes from the original series, and "The Cellar" really does not need 52 minutes to make its basic point about Sam learning to form emotional connections (before traveling through time, he's busy with one-night stands on Tinder). The twists and turns in the plot often feel like delaying tactics, and the surprise reveals will be obvious to anyone who's seen a TV show or movie involving time paradoxes.
For a show with an allegedly huge budget ($5 million per episode), Amazing Stories (at least in this episode) looks remarkably threadbare. The old-timey town where Sam ends up could have been lifted right from a low-budget direct-to-video Western.
Fantastical stories don't necessarily need dazzling effects to be engrossing, but the pedestrian script by American Horror Story veteran Jessica Sharzer and the functional direction by TV journeyman Chris Long don't exactly inspire comparisons to Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert Zemeckis or any of the other major talents who worked on the original series. The script is full of hokey, obvious dialogue (when Evelyn asks where he's from, Sam says, "I can answer that, but you wouldn't believe me"), and the performances are dull and uninspired.
The original Amazing Stories ran for just two seasons on NBC from 1985 to 1987, winning five Emmys but never scoring huge ratings, and some of its episodes were pretty cheesy as well. This revival may be more notable for nostalgia than for artistic merit, despite the undeniable talent involved. Like the producers of the new Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories showrunners Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (creators of Once Upon a Time) don't seem to have a handle on what a modern update of this show should look like, at least in this opening episode.
Last year, O'Brien starred in the first episode of another genre anthology series that got much less attention, YouTube Premium's Weird City. That series was more successful at carving out its own quirky identity, although it suffered the fate of premiering on a streaming platform that was already floundering and never found an audience. Amazing Stories has a more impressive pedigree (Spielberg remains an executive producer) and a larger built-in audience, but there's no distinctive creative vision behind this episode. Spielberg was inspired to create the original series after spending his childhood reading fantastical tales in the old Amazing Stories magazine, but this new series seems inspired only by branding opportunities. Maybe Apple is right to keep it quiet.
From executive producers Steven Spielberg, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, Amazing Stories premieres the first episode of its five-episode season on March 6 on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes debuting each Friday.