Following the runaway success of Wednesday and Stranger Things, Netflix has gambled on another gothy young adult show, similarly primed to become impressionable teens’ entire personalities. Lockwood and Co – created by Joe Cornish – is a lore-heavy supernatural series set in an alternative modern Britain where an epidemic of ghosts has raged for 50 years, but the only people able to see and fight them are children. To deal with “the problem” there are ghost-hunting agencies run by adults, who use the children to locate the angry spirits and destroy the “source” from which they emanate.
Despite the title, the central role is held by Lucy Carlisle (played by Ruby Stokes), and much of the first episode is devoted to her origin story, starting as a 12-year-old who can hear ghosts. Her northern town is filled with disaffected, unemployed adults, and she is sent to work at an adult-run agency by a brutal mother who growls that she has no choice as “your father left us with nothing when he drank himself to death”.
