What if a tiger came to tea? What if you won a ticket to a magical chocolate factory? What if an owl was afraid of the dark? What if a machine suddenly appeared in the grocery store of a small unassuming town overnight that was able, for $2 and your social security number and fingerprints, to tell you your true life potential?
As irresistible premises go, that of The Big Door Prize is a great one. Adapted from MO Walsh’s 2020 novel, the 10-part series uses the (largely unexplained) existence of the machine to explore that ever-fascinating question of whether there is such a thing as too much knowledge, and how much truth humanity can bear. Is the machine a liberation or an electronic Pandora’s box?
That makes it sound weighty. It is not. It is funny, friendly and as beautifully light on its feet as you might expect from its creator, David West Read, who worked as a writer and producer on Schitt’s Creek. He is hugely helped in this by the presence and immaculate comic timing of Chris O’Dowd as amiable family man, history teacher and good whistler Dusty Hubbard. O’Dowd made his name playing quintessential beta male Roy in the weird and wonderful The IT Crowd and is the actor you want when you need to ground any show with surreal or sci-fi elements in reality and keep the emotional stakes credible.
Each episode focuses on a different member of the ordinary and ordinarily happy-enough town of Deerfield, but it is the story of Dusty and his wife, Cass (Gabrielle Dennis), that we follow throughout. We meet him on his 40th birthday – delighted with the scooter (and camo helmet) Cass has bought him and baffled by the surprise gift of a theremin, but surrounded by family and suffused with contentment. After all, now he has all he ever wanted AND a musical instrument derived from Soviet research into proximity sensors, so what, really, is there to complain about? Off he scoots, whistling, into town where all the talk is of Morpho, the fortune-telling machine.
Dusty is unsettled by the news from the off, and more so as the town transforms into a crucible filled with people testing out the potential they have been told they have. The place fills with hitherto sober citizens fancying themselves as the martial arts experts, storytellers, guitarists or simply – in the case of the owner of the local Italian restaurant, a man already not lacking in confidence and who has had his eye on Cass since high school – superstar that Morpho has told them they could be. Dusty’s parents decide to divorce so she can travel to Europe to follow her apparent destiny as a healer (in vain does her son point out that she could stay and be a doctor “like you already are”) and he can become a model. The school principal (Cocoa Brown) has become a biker. She rides straight into a tree but remains cheerful about her prospects.
There are other mysteries to be revealed, such as why blue spots are appearing on Dusty’s bum and what led to the death of one of his students a year ago, but these are woven in and out of the inhabitants’ personal stories and the fissuring of the Hubbards’ marriage when she and Dusty (after he finally gives in to temptation and feeds his $2 in) receive wildly different Life Potential cards from the – malevolent? – Morpho. By the end of episode two, the theremin is no longer seen as a quirky gift but a coded message of unhappiness from an ambitious wife frustrated by her husband’s lack of interest in broadening his horizons. “Is this happy?” she asks. Dusty doesn’t know. “I never really had to think about it – and that was just fine!” he replies.
Those who prefer this kind of premise to be the launchpad for a deep dive into the darkest recesses of the human psyche will need to look elsewhere (probably back into the eternal bleakness of Black Mirror). But for those of us who are having to take our medicine in ever more diluted measures if we are to survive at all, The Big Door Prize will do nicely. All of human life is here, but with jokes. It’s Ted Lasso – or the Schitts – with the softest of sci-fi twists. It charms you into watching and thinking instead of pressing a foot on your neck and pushing your face into the mire. I for one am grateful.
The Big Door Prize is on Apple TV+ now.
