IT: Welcome to Derry opens with a promise: a slow-burn, character-driven prequel set before Pennywise’s reign of terror. What follows is a TV series that mostly delivers on tone, but struggles to find a reason for its own existence. The show premiered in October 2025, based on Stephen King’s novel It, and it aims to establish the town of Derry, Maine, as a place of quiet dread before the monster arrives. It succeeds at mood, less at plot.
Trailer, via HBO Max.
The Town of Derry
The series is built on atmosphere. The town is shown as a place of decay, where the river carries secrets and the streets hold a history of violence. The show spends its early episodes establishing the residents, the local politics, and the strange occurrences that precede the arrival of Pennywise. This is where the series is at its best, capturing the particular dread of a small town hiding its worst impulses beneath a thin layer of normalcy.
The performances across the ensemble cast are solid. The young actors who play the children of Derry carry the weight of the show’s emotional core, and the adults who run the town are drawn with enough complexity to make their corruption feel earned. The show knows how to use silence and shadow to build tension, and those moments work.
The Problem With the Plot
Where the series stumbles is in its pacing. The middle stretch drags heavily, with episodes that feel like filler rather than building toward anything. Characters are introduced, conflicts arise, and then the show retreats into exposition-heavy scenes that do little to move the story forward. The central mystery — why Derry is cursed, what the town’s history is — is hinted at but rarely explored in depth.
The show also leans too heavily on the idea that the town itself is alive and malevolent. That concept, borrowed from the novel, is presented without much context, leaving viewers to wonder why exactly the town hates its own people. The show tries to ground this in a history of abuse and neglect, but the connection between that history and the present-day horrors is often left unexplained.
Pennywise Arrives
Pennywise does not appear until the final stretch of the season, and even then he is a presence more felt than seen. The show treats him as a force of nature, a manifestation of the town’s collective fear and anger. This is a bold choice, but it also means that the show’s central threat feels distant for most of its runtime. The build-up to Pennywise’s reveal is effective, but the payoff is smaller than expected.
The show’s final episodes lean into the horror elements more fully, and they are the strongest parts of the series. The scares are genuinely unsettling, and the show finds ways to make the familiar territory of It feel fresh. But the overall arc suffers from a lack of urgency. The audience knows Pennywise is coming, and the show spends too much time circling around that inevitability.
What Works
- The depiction of Derry as a living, malevolent entity
- Strong ensemble performances from the young cast
- Effective use of setting to build dread
- The final stretch, when the horror elements are fully engaged
What Doesn’t Work
- A middle section that feels padded and slow
- Underdeveloped connections between the town’s history and its present-day horrors
- A central mystery that is hinted at but never fully resolved
- Pennywise’s late arrival leaves the threat feeling distant for most of the season
The Final Word
IT: Welcome to Derry is a competent, atmospheric prequel that fails to justify its own existence. It captures the dread of King’s Derry with skill, but it struggles to find a story worth telling beyond the setup for what comes next. The show is worth watching for its mood and its performances, but it is ultimately a footnote to the larger story it is meant to precede.
The show’s ambition is visible, but its execution falls short. The result is a series that feels like a prologue without a book to follow, and that lack of direction is its biggest weakness. IT: Welcome to Derry is a watchable, if uneven, prequel that sets the stage for future installments without earning its own place in the canon.
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