Sometimes you just need to give it up - walking away from a TV series.

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Sometimes you just need to give it up.
-Walking away from a TV series

I can, hand on heart, confess to being an avid streamer of content. It’s part of our family routine – we have dinner, then sit down to watch something on the box. Our preference is usually television series, because they are shorter – and we often only sit down for an hour or so before heading off to bed. It seems to me, then, that my time is valuable – and, the thing we’ve noticed is, that during the COVID shutdowns, not a huge amount of new content was being produced, and some of it looks great on the surface, but it turns out to be rubbish.

This raises the question: at what point do you give up on a show? Most series now seem to be 10 episodes in length and run from 50 to 60 minutes each. Sometimes you will watch all 10 episodes and say, ‘That was great’, or perhaps you get to episode 8 or 9 and think, ‘You know, I’ve come this far, I’ll just finish it’. In our household, we often give shows an episode to see if it can hook us, or potentially let us see enough promise in it to keep going. I think we’ve sat down to other shows and only lasted minutes. It’s a fickle business finding a show.

But recently, we came across Chapelwaite, a 2021 horror series that is based on a Stephen King short story, ‘Jeruselum’s lot’. Now – when it comes to Stephen King, we have an understanding: you’ll be gripped for 85% of the story, and then it will get dumb as he resorts to the supernatural to explain something unexplainable. In a ten episode series, we can live with that – as the worlds and characters he creates are magically engaging.

With ‘Chapelwaite’ it was no different – a sea Captain (Captain Boon) receives a letter following the death of his wife, which informs him of a cousin’s death and notes that he would receive the entire family estate and business. It was a mysterious moment, equally matched by the shroud of mystery surrounding the gothic mansion when he arrives there. The mood is unsettling from the start, the townsfolk give the Boon family suspicious stares, there are whispers about them – and there is a heavy unknown truth settling over the family. The house seems to creak and groan and take on a life of itself – and then there is the cellar. It’s a cold and dark place, and laden with all sorts of equipment – including a bathtub with straps, resembling some artifice of torture.

As the show develops, it becomes clear that there is a curse of madness over the Boon family, an earlier flashback to Captain Boon’s father from thirty years earlier, showed how the madness has the ability to destroy lives. The Captain has constant visions of worms, and these visions are developed alongside people who walk in the forest claiming the necessity of finding a book – they are threatening, without producing any malice yet. The townsfolk attempt to attack the Captain and his family, turning up at his manor in the middle of the night with flaming torches (this was a bit over the top, but sets up an antagonism). On their fleeing from the property, deaths occur – as death seems to do so in the film, a constant motif.

And then there is the illness in the town, which the townsfolk believed is somehow caused by the Boon family. Religious people point to the evil of the family and wish them ill, but this doesn’t stop the deaths of loved one. As a young girl dies, she claims she was killed by Stephen Boon – the cousin of Captain Boon who bequeathed the property to him. The townsfolk are aghast, as they had attended his viewing and seen the dead body for themselves. Unnerved by the accusation, Captain Boom digs up his cousins grave to find it empty.

You can see that this show was building beautifully into something that was shrouded in all the right kinds of horror and mystery.

SPOILERS AHEAD

But then Episode 4 of 10 comes along. At this point, my wife and I were feeling pretty committed to this show. We had a feeling it would get dumb, but we felt we still had a while to go before that happened. Then Episode 4 – the family find a tunnel in the barn which leads to the house – it seems that Captain Boon, on moving into the manor, didn’t realise that he only had access to half the house, the other half was internal corridors and blocked off rooms. And – this is where his cousin, Stephen, and Stephen’s father, Phillip, must likely hang out during the day. There are dead animals all over the place – and, at this earlier point in the series, it is revealed that they are vampires. At the end of the episode, a group of worshippers of the WORM turn up to tell Captain Boon to go and meet Jakob.

In short, an exceptionally promising series went dumb – we were 3 ½ hours in, and then all it took was twenty minutes for us to say, ‘We’re not going to watch the next 6 hours. This show is, pun intended, dead to us’.

At what point do you give up on a show? Have you seen this one the whole way through? What do you think of Stephen King adaptions – do you also have a love/hate relationship with them?

Any images or content discussed in this blog are owned by the production companies: De Line Pictures, Epix Studies, Stage 6 Films, Sony Pictures Television. It originally aired on the Epix network.