Premiering this week on Apple TV+, "The Big Door Prize" is "based on the book created by M.O. Walsh," as it is unusually credited here, and developed by David West Read, a writer and producer on "Schitt's Creek." Once again, we are in a whimsical small town, called Deerfield, full of characters that are full of character — your typical television hamlet, at once multicultural and culturally generic. An Anytown, with its grocery, bar, restaurant and high school. Most everyone knows most everyone.
One day, a machine appears in the grocery store. It looks something like an '80s arcade game, glows blue and bears the image of a butterfly and the words "Morpho. Discover Your Life Potential." No one knows how it got there — or if anyone does, they aren't saying — or what makes it go. But its purpose is to dispense a card that, in a word, maybe two, reveals something essential about the user. The townspeople line up to pay the $2 — and, adding the incredible to the fantastic — no one balks when it asks them to enter a Social Security number. (In Walsh's book, the gizmo reads a person's DNA, which roots it in real-world questions of predictability; here, it's just a matter of magic.)
Ordinarily, one would expect such a premise to lead to mayhem and tragedy as secrets are revealed, desires unsuppressed, rash decisions taken — a horror story, founded on the theory that it is only convention and lies and illusion that hold us together, individually and collectively. Lies and conventions and illusions do play a part in "The Big Door Prize"; rash decisions will be taken. But this is a comedy — and not a dark one — that subscribes rather to the notion that change can be good, that the truth sets you free.
