The Big Door Prize season 2 review: A messy, intriguing improvement
Although the Apple TV+ show still has flaws, it boasts a fantastic cast and just the right amount of mystery-box storytelling
Hand to god, when the screen on the all-knowing Morpho machine flashed up the words “Are you ready for the next stage?” at the end of The Big Door Prize season one, our answer at the time was an emphatic “No.” We (brag) texted a successful screenwriter friend asking them to watch it and see if they found it as embarrassingly folksy and cheap as we did. We didn’t read the novel it was based on, but the vibe we got about it from watching the show is “What if John Green tried to write something like The Leftovers,” which is our idea of a bad time.
But we did watch it all, including season two (which premieres April 24 on Apple TV+) as soon as it was available to critics, so who’s the real sucker here? Even at the second season’s worst, The Big Door Prize stumbles into, if not good TV, interesting TV by virtue of its fantastic cast and just the right amount of mystery-box storytelling. Season one loyalists will not be shocked to discover that there’s still little by way of concrete answers on the Morpho machine, which spat out a card revealing the user’s “life potential” as a hot little plot device. This year, the ante’s upped, and once the machine gets going again (in a manner we won’t spoil here), a whole new sensation sweeps the town.
At the center of it all is our main trio, the Hubbard family, and their respective agonies over their assigned “potentials”: Dusty (Chris O’Dowd), who got “Teacher/Whistler” and is kind of down about it since he is a teacher and whistler, but also once had an epiphany while skiing in a town named Whistler? This is bonkers and alarming information which, as of writing, is never meaningfully interrogated. Dusty’s wife, Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) got “Royalty” to the amusement/barely veiled jealousy of the rest of the town. And their teen daughter Trina nabbed “Liar” and is currently dating her dead ex’s twin brother. Said dead ex also seems to have some kind of connection to the Morpho’s appearance in the first place. It’s a whole lot to take in.
The first few episodes of Big Door Prize’s second season satisfied the hater in us: It’s easily one of Apple’s worst-looking shows, the plot moves like a giant clunking airliner circling a runway waiting for clearance, and some scenes feel stitched together from like five separate filming sessions where each actor was in a different room with absolutely no idea who else is in the scene with them, with the lighting in each new shot apparently set to “random” every time. Spare a thought for the innocent, talented cast here which also includes the criminally underrated Ally Maki, Frasier alum Patrick Kerr as the storeowner who becomes the de facto keeper of the Morpho machine, and Crystal R. Fox as Cass’ terminally self-obsessed mother Izzy.
