Apple TV+’s reboot of Amazing Stories is out and Joe and I are here to dig into the…uh, not-so-amazing first episode, “The Cellar.”

TERRY

Alright, Joe, we have the start of another Apple TV+ show and I was curious if this one would turn out as excellent as Servant, our first foray into the fledgling streaming service’s output. The jury’s out on the show as a whole, but this episode didn’t give me the warm fuzzies. With an anthology show, you should always lead with your best foot forward and, well, if this is the best foot…

Before I get too far ahead of myself, this episode is titled “The Cellar” and it’s a whole lot less menacing than the title, or opening, of the show would suggest. Sam (Dylan O’Brien) and Jacob (Micah Stock) Taylor are brothers who operate a carpentry business focused on refurbishing homes. Their latest is a Victorian house that has seen better days (and looks conspicuously like the house from After Midnight). As they begin tearing things down, they discover a box of Fig Newtons containing a picture of a bride and a matchbox for a place called The Compound with the word “cabbage” written inside.

Sam is, in his brother’s words, a typical millennial. Always late, always scrolling through Tinder for the next date. But when he’s down in the cellar during a storm, the barometer drops and he finds himself in the past, where he meets the soon-to-be-bride from the picture Evelyn (Victoria Pedretti). They fall in love as quickly as possible over a 52 minute runtime and, well, complications arise.

So, Joe, I have a confession. Well, three, to be honest. The first one is really simple: when I started this reboot of Amazing Stories I literally squealed when Dylan O’Brien showed up. I wasn’t expecting him and I haven’t seen him in anything since his disastrous accident on the set of Maze Runner: The Death Cure. I love him and have ever since he played Stiles in Teen Wolf. I truly think he’s an underrated actor (and a cutie, to boot). But we also have Victoria Pedretti, fresh off her double whammy turns in The Haunting of Hill House and as Love on season two of YOU. Unfortunately, they have no chemistry together in a show about a love that transcends time and space.

Which leads me to my second confession. I dislike most time travel stories and I hate when they involve romance. So I went into “The Cellar” with a chip on my shoulder the moment I realized it wasn’t about something creepy in the cellar. It’s a theme that has been done to death and this doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, except a sidecar of melodrama. We have a woman who’s been basically sold to William (DID YOU CATCH THE ACTOR??), a wealthy man, and be a mother to his two children. Evelyn is a singer who isn’t supposed to like music because William “will not understand [her] perverse taste in music.” Of course, Sam will show her the importance of her voice and try to whisk her away to a time when she can be appreciated, knight in shining armor style.

My final confession is that I’ve never seen the original Amazing Stories and, honestly (and kind of strangely?) it wasn’t until I heard about this reboot that I knew it was A Thing that Existed. So I have no nostalgia for the show and I don’t know how this one stacks up to the original series. It’s sort of like a more family-friendly Twilight Zone, I guess? One without any sense of teeth or social critique...unless the social critique is that the past was bad for women and good for straight white men, so let’s trade places?

But what about you, Joe? What’s your experience with Amazing Stories and how did this entry work for you? Did the romance sweep your off your feet or are you a jaded cynic, like me, and find it smarmy? And can we talk about the fact Sam has a gay brother and what the story could have been if it were a gay dude going back in time to find love?

JOE

Phew! You’ve given me a lot to respond to.

I’ll start at the end because no, I don’t have any experience with Amazing Stories. Like you, I knew it was an anthology of tales that samples a variety of different genres and had what I assumed were novel or moralistic messages about the human condition (I’ve heard it bandied around in conversations about shows that uplift or celebrate humanity).

So I’m not surprised that what we get in this first stand alone episode is a love story spread out over time, because what could be more quintessentially human than everlasting love. But not queer love, Terry - because although it is “2019” (that’s when the present days scenes are set) - the best we can hope for are stories where we exist and already have babies (but not houses! Those are expensive).

I jest because there’s nothing quintessential about updating a series to include diverse representation and then sidelining it for boring, milquetoast straight white romance. Jacob isn’t even a character in the film, his husband and baby girl are seen in picture, but never appear on screen and the only characters of colour are those who are hidden away below ground in the 1919 speakeasy (again: no speaking parts or character names). Yes, I appreciate that this isn’t the story that “The Cellar” is telling, but what is the point of updating the series if you’re only going to tell the most trite, rote version. How many times have we seen this particular tale?!

So my confession time: I was mildly reticent to dig into this because of executive producer Steven Spielberg’s involvement. I’ve basically avoided Spielberg’s output for the last decade and a half because I find his incredibly traditional family-oriented focus - particularly on father/son relationships - to be boring, outplayed and, frankly, verging on regressive. Spielberg’s unending love of nostalgia, particularly his love of serials and old Hollywood, should be a perfect fit for my sensibilities, but I find his narratives and his craft too old school and staid. In my honest opinion, he hasn’t made a truly great film in nearly twenty years (the one-two punch of Catch Me If You Can and Minority Report).

Now, it should be noted that he’s not directing this episode and we don’t have the specs on other episodes besides this one. But if the involvement of Once Upon A Time… creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis as showrunners suggests anything, it is that we’re in for more treacly, genre-lite, childish fare because that was their specialty on that show. Occasionally there’d be a surprise or two, but it was A LOT of predictable fare.

Which brings us to the creative team for this particular episode: director (and series executive producer) Chris Long and writer Jessica Sharzer, who both have storied careers in television. Long most recently directed nine episodes of FX’s outstanding The Americans while Sharzer wrote YA screenplays Speak and Nerve, but has been spending a lot of time recently on American Horror Story, as well as the Blake Lively/Anna Kendrick thriller A Simple Favor.

Looking at this talent, I’ll admit that I am kinda confounded. “The Cellar” had virtually no visual signature for me (it’s solidly directed, but completely forgettable outside of perhaps the scene when Evelyn swirls through the maelstrom to come to the present in the climax). And, most problematically, this narrative is boring at best and full of lazy tropes at worst. Despite clocking in at nearly 52 minutes, there are still HUGE plot/time jumps required to try and convince us that Sam and Evelyn are in love. Hell, I didn’t even realize that they had slept together until he encouraged her to jump in the water solo because it’s all so chaste!

Terry, what do you make of the disjunction between these credentials and the final product? Considering that each episode of Amazing Stories promises new actors, writers, directors and genres, should we even fret that this first entry isn’t all that good? And what are you hoping to see in future episodes?

TERRY

We had talked a bit offline about the talent behind the camera, Joe, and I was shocked, flummoxed, utterly bewildered and a bunch of other adjectives. How does a writer that brought so much personality and edginess to A Simple Favor create such a bland story? I don’t want to keep dogging on it, but the only reason our two leads were in love were because the story warranted it. I did not believe for a moment, outside of the fact that these are two attractive people, that there’d be a spark of romance between them. It wants to be The Outlander without any sex, romance or anything to say.

I am worried that this episode is only a harbinger of what’s to come. Treacly, as you said, empty stories. I do wonder if Apple has much confidence in the series since, as Newsweek reports, the first season was cut from ten episodes to five. I personally haven’t had much confidence in the series ever since Bryan Fuller left. The other episode descriptions that have been released also don’t give me much hope. You mentioned Spielberg’s nostalgia-fueled output recently and the episodes don’t really assuage that fear. “The Rift” is apparently about a modern day family seeing a WWII pilot through a time rift that changes their lives. Another is about a grandfather who gets superpowers.

I guess we’ll see, but this episode did not do anything for me. As much as I dislike time travel romances, I’d much rather watch this: