Teacup Review: Peacock's Fun Horror Mystery Is Perfectly Paced

Brevity is the best thing Teacup has going for it. That's not a backhanded compliment; Peacock's horror series is tight. At eight half-hour episodes, there's no room for anything extraneous. It's a well-calibrated plot delivery machine. It's more common for shows to have not enough story stretched across too much time than the other way around, so Teacup's focus on perfect pacing is refreshing.

Teacup could have been a bigger story, but it got stripped down to its essentials. Creator Ian McCulloch writes in his press notes that Stinger, the 1988 Robert McCammon novel on which Teacup is based, is an epic like Stephen King's The Stand, but he turned it into a single-location, small aperture story like Signs, The Thing, or A Quiet Place. Those three movies are influences Teacup wears on its sleeve. 

The story is set on a farm in rural Georgia owned by the Chenoweth family. Equine veterinarian Maggie (Yvonne Strahovski) and her husband James (Scott Speedman) are having some marital problems, but they're trying to act normal for their kids Meryl (Émilie Bierre) and Arlo (Caleb Dolden) and James' mother Ellen (Kathy Baker). It's not a normal day, though. The animals are acting strangely. Electronics are on the fritz, and then the power goes out completely. Arlo wanders off and meets someone in the woods who changes his life. And then a guy in a gas mask shows up, paints a blue line on the ground to mark a perimeter, and warns them not to cross it. The Chenoweths and their neighbors — Ruben (Chaske Spencer), Valeria (Diany Rodriguez), and Nicholas Shanley (Luciano Leroux) and Donald (Boris McGiver) and Claire Kelly (Holly A. Morris) — are trapped, and they have to figure out how to get out before they're killed by an external threat or they kill each other. 

8.0

Teacup

at Peacock

Like

• Excellent pace
• Engaging mystery
• Above-average execution of horror movie style on television

Dislike

• Unnatural dialogue
• Thin characters

Horror is hard to execute on TV because the genre requires sustained tension that is difficult to maintain over the course of a whole season, but Teacup's tightly focused plot and setting help keep it feeling like a horror movie. It's executive-produced by The Conjuring Universe creator James Wan, who is one of single-location horror's foremost innovators. 

Its horror movie-style focus on plot means the characters are a bit thin, however. They're pretty broad types. Maggie is intense. Ellen is chill. Donald is Trumpy but brave. They get fleshed out more over the course of the season, but there just isn't a lot of real estate for complex character development. Underdeveloped characters would only be a disqualifying problem if complex characters were what Teacup was really about, and it's not. It's about thrills. And there's a midseason standalone episode focused on a character named McNab (Rob Morgan) that shows Teacup can be meaningfully character-focused when it wants to be. 

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Teacup's bigger problem is tin-eared dialogue. There are baffling anecdotes and cheesy proclamations aplenty. The more experienced actors can sell it — McGiver, previously of Servant and Evil, is officially a go-to character actor on eccentric horror shows for his ability to deliver lines in unexpected ways, and Spencer (The English) makes the show's least developed character into its most emotionally present one — but the younger performers have trouble making it sound natural, which is more of a writing problem than an acting one. 

To be clear, though, Teacup's strengths are far more numerous than its flaws. It's beautifully shot, with elegant camera moves and compositions. It maintains a dread-filled atmosphere. It gets better as it goes and sets up a bigger Season 2 in an organic way, but it's gripping from the very beginning. There's never a moment when Teacup takes too long to get to the next plot development. It's a relentlessly fun and exciting mystery thriller. Other shows should study it for lessons on how to pace a season of television.  

Premieres: Thursday, Oct. 10 on Peacock with two episodes; two episodes release weekly through Oct. 31
Who's in it: Yvonne Strahovski, Scott Speedman, Chaske Spencer, Boris McIver, Kathy Baker, Diany Rodriguez, Rob Morgan
Who's behind it: Ian McCulloch (showrunner), James Wan
For fans of: Signs, The Thing, A Quiet Place
How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8