In European folklore, a changeling is a human-like creature left in place of a human (typically a baby or a weird little kid) stolen by other fairies. Here’s my thing: why bother? You know what I mean? Why bother replacing the baby or weird little kid with a creature? Why bother with that step? Just kidnap the baby. If you want to send the parents mad with grief, take their baby. Putting a human-ish creature in the cot to drive them slowly crazy over time seems like a waste of magic and energy. Sorry to criticise the ancient fairies of Europe, but there’s such a thing as overdoing it, you know?
Which brings us neatly to The Changeling (from Friday 8 September), the new Apple TV+ show about – well, anyway. The Changeling is based on Victor LaValle’s 2017 book of the same name, and that’s very important to what the show turns into: heavily literary, with a narration by LaValle himself and a lot of complicated knots of story and chronology that couldn’t be taken from anything other than a book. Book-to-TV adaptations are not new – if I may use a literary phrase, “no duh” – but so often they suffer from the conversion, the stripping out of detail and weirdness and complexity, the softening of edges and the show-you-so-you-see-it obviousness of putting something on screen.
The Changeling does something new with it, and different: it very much feels like a book that just happens to have an off button and LaKeith Stanfield in it – which is good. It’s packed with themes and mysteries and odd bookish dialogue – Stanfield’s character, Apollo, keeps yelling: “I am the god Apollo!” and they really did get lucky getting an actor with his crumpled charisma for this one because that is an absolutely ridiculous line to say once, let alone over and over.
It keeps yanking back to the 70s, when Apollo’s mother and father met then mysteriously uncoupled, and there are a lot of woozy dream sequences. We see Apollo meet and fall in love with his wife, Emma (played by Clark Backo: as a couple, they look incredible together, like actual real-life partners), and then their postpartum life and dual spooky backstories meet for something slitheringly uncomfortable. The camera is deliberately gauzy and off-focus in a lot of shots, adding to the dreamy (or … nightmarish?) texture. And then, well. To say “someone swapped out the good TV show with a TV show-like creature” would be a bit obvious, wouldn’t it?
More than any show I’ve seen this year, The Changeling suffers from “things happening-ism”, where things just keep happening. There is: one curse, then maybe another curse, though it’s hard to tell; for some reason Norway is very important in all this; steam and smoke are seemingly vital to what’s happening, as are chains and witchcraft; there are a lot of boring scenes where Apollo’s mother has a job; characters have flashbacks and friends with chummy banter appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly; books are important but so is looking at your phone. There are moments of very true horror, but also many moments of faffing about, and even more moments when characters do quite strange and unnatural things and then everyone around them just shrugs and goes, OK, cool, I guess.
The first episode is gripping – a truly romantic origin story, with something uneasy in the background and whispers of what’s to come – and then, like, a computer programmer turns up and info dumps a load of plot in three very annoying portions. Someone discovers a rare book in a basement for some odd reason that’s actually central to the plot. It starts out literary and quickly becomes fan fiction.
But weirdly, despite not personally liking where The Changeling went (in short: all over the place), I did like the fact it was allowed to go there. It’s brave to make a series that squirms in so many different directions, load it with great actors and beautiful cinematography, make every episode an hour long and just … hope for the best. We are, of course, living through an astonishing boom time for expensive, ambitious streaming-platform series (“no duh”), and some are going to miss harder than they hit. But to get to the next level of TV, big swings are going to be the things that get us there. One day, someone who watched The Changeling is going to be inspired to make a really, really good book-to-TV adaptation. This one just isn’t quite it.
