Dusty and Cass have a fairly normal life. They have been together since high school, have a lovely daughter named Trina and a beautiful home in a small American town. He is a school teacher, she sells t-shirts in her mother’s boutique. Everything is really nice. But is nice enough? Dusty (Chris O’Dowd, “The IT Team”) has just reached the age where such questions are asked – 40 is round and menacing – but his private 40-year-old crisis quickly turns into the mid-life crisis of an entire town under strange circumstances. In the local grocery store there is a machine that prints small blue notes, which reveal to each person their “life potential”. No one knows where she came from, but everyone is soon convinced that she is telling the truth and behave accordingly.
Apple TV+ classifies their new series, The Big Door Prize, as a comedy – but it’s not, and it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to be. In its first three episodes, you won’t find many jokes, and even the ones that are already there aren’t exactly looking to knock you to the floor. But as soon as you let go of the expectation of laughs, a story is revealed that is a little absurd and a lot human. While the secondary characters embrace radical life changes without blinking (the school principal buys a motorcycle, Dusty’s father becomes a model), the characters who stand at the center of the plot go through subtle and slower changes, which connect well with the difficulties they faced anyway. This combination creates a very specific feeling at the very beginning – anything can happen, but nothing happens without a reason.
The heart of the series is not necessarily the mystery that underlies it – a magical machine that appeared one day without an explanation of who brought it and how it works – but the consequences of its appearance. Accordingly, this is a series that sanctifies the everyday, the “ordinary” life, and not the wonderful and endless possibilities that the machine brings with it. After two or three characters who react with surprise to the note they received, you would expect the concept to exhaust itself, but the opposite is true – each such revelation only enriches the story even more and adds another small human story to the puzzle. The dilemmas and feelings that the town’s residents face could also arise in other, more realistic ways – feelings of being missed, impostor syndrome, fear of finding out that you’ve actually wasted all this time, but also the fear that what you already have is all you can ever have. In short, the machine did not create anything new, it only brought everything to the surface all at once – therefore its fantastic element was also required.
Dusty is the hero with whom we enter the story and he is not exactly an obvious choice. His main characteristic as a character is the fact that there is nothing really unusual about him. He’s a nice guy with a nice family and a perfectly fine job, and that’s all. Is it too little? Maybe, maybe not. Even for those who are not a 40-year-old teacher from a small town, it is easy to sympathize with the dry inertia in which he leads his life, and the main question concerning him is not only whether he can reinvent himself, but whether he even needs to. “The study of history is the study of change”, he tells his students in one of the classes, but he himself is worried about those changes much more than he is excited about them.
Although Dusty and his family are the emotional heart of the series, it is able to expand the picture outside of their story, with each episode of the series focusing on another character without abandoning the plots that we have already begun to explore in the previous episodes. The ensemble of characters in the series includes, among others, a boy who collapses under the burden of expectations, a woman who embarks on a journey of maturation and self-discovery after years of routine, a career woman who discovers that her potential lies, apparently, in a completely different field, and a grocer with a fondness for tricks and magic. The small town is boring to the extent required, and at the same time it also has a certain charm – the characters are different from each other and interesting each in their own way, without falling into the realms of Stars-Hollow where each character has some surprising hobby or funny characteristic that recurs in every episode.
Everything together creates a story full of details but not busy or burdensome, and especially one that is intriguing to see where it will develop from here. The concept here is the kind that could easily be ruined with a stupid twist or an inadequate explanation, but the subtlety it’s shown so far gives the feeling that we’re in good hands.
“The prize at the big door”, first three episodes now on Apple TV+