By now, Stephen King’s It needs no introduction. The 1986 novel was a best-seller; the Andy Muschietti movies, released in 2017 and 2019, were hits; and the 1990 miniseries starring Tim Curry is a cult classic. Pennywise has a burnished place in the horror villain hall of fame; others may come close, but there’s no scarier clown in the genre.
Into this well-worn territory wades HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, a prequel to Muschietti’s films that turns the clock back 27 years, in keeping with Pennywise’s visitation cycle, exploring the small town of Derry, Maine, in 1962. There are also a handful of flashbacks to even earlier eras across the first five episodes (of eight total), which io9 viewed for the purposes of this spoiler-free review.
It falls on Welcome to Derry’s creators—executive producer Andy Muschietti, who also directs several episodes; executive producer Barbara Muschietti; and executive producers Brad Caleb Kane and Jason Fuchs, who are also co-showrunners and writers—to balance “stuff we already know” (which is a lot, including the fact that Pennywise survives for multiple future cycles) and “new stuff,” bringing in fresh characters and drama that makes it worth spending more time within Derry’s grim borders.
“Grim” might not be a strong enough word. In keeping with the classic small towns that populate King’s writing, Derry is wholesome at first glance—but it doesn’t take much for the ugliness to start poking through.
Some of that is due to Pennywise’s malevolent influence, which has both physical and psychological effects on the population. People are meaner, more short-tempered. It feels like at any given moment, something awful might happen—because it often does.
And some of that is exacerbated by Welcome to Derry’s early-1960s setting. Even in relatively progressive Maine, the racism that the concurrent civil rights movement was fighting against still shows its face, and Cold War unease, especially nuclear fears, is present everywhere. There are also more intimate small-town cruelties, including abusive parents and teenage mean girls, that underline the fact that It’s dominating theme of the loss of innocence isn’t solely down to supernatural causes.
As we’ve seen in previous It-adjacent works, the young cast is the central focus of Welcome to Derry’s story. The show’s jaw-dropping first scene—the opening moments of which take place in a movie theater, where the 1962 hit The Music Man warns us in no uncertain terms that “we’ve got trouble”—establishes that shocking things can and will happen.
That carries through the entire pilot episode, which lets the viewer know in no uncertain terms that there is no mercy to be found here. The original story, of course, brings back the young characters as adults in its second half. Welcome to Derry doesn’t have that safety net. We don’t know who’ll make it through.
With a tense tone punctuated by moments of brutal chaos locked into place, Welcome to Derry sets about introducing the various plots that will interweave throughout the season. And there are a lot competing for attention, even in an eight-part series with episodes that average just under an hour each.
Dead center are the awkward misfits of Derry High School who form a sort of proto-Losers Club friend group. The young actors are tasked with a lot of emotional heavy lifting as Pennywise targets them one by one, and unfortunately some have stronger chops than others.
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