HBO’s Lovecraft Country premiered on August 16, 2020, and ran ten episodes before its first season closed on October 18, 2020. Misha Green developed the series from Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, and the show treats that novel as a thing that exists inside its own story. That is the first clue that this is not a standard horror anthology. It is a road trip, a family history and a puzzle about who gets to write the ending.
Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes TV.
Atticus Freeman and the Road Trip
The premise is simple on its face. Atticus “Tic” Freeman, played by Jonathan Majors, joins his friend Letitia “Leti” Lewis and his Uncle George to drive across 1950s Jim Crow America and find his missing father. Jurnee Smollett-Bell plays Leti. Michael Kenneth Williams plays Montrose Freeman, the father Tic is looking for.
The road trip is the engine, but the country it crosses is the point. The racist terrors of white America and the monsters pulled from a Lovecraft paperback are not separate problems. They arrive together, and the show refuses to rank them.
Leti, Ruby and the Women Who Carry the Season
Wunmi Mosaku plays Ruby Baptiste. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Hippolyta Freeman. Abbey Lee plays Christina Braithwaite, a role that replaced Elizabeth Debicki after Debicki left the production. Jamie Chung plays Ji-Ah.
These are not supporting turns. The season’s weight shifts onto them whenever the road trip stalls, and the casting history behind the show is its own small story. Smollett was announced as the female lead on April 26, 2018. Majors joined as the male lead on May 2, 2018, and Mosaku was confirmed as a regular a day later. Ellis and Debicki were announced as regulars on June 19, 2018, with Courtney B. Vance recurring. Williams was reported in a leading role on October 10, 2018. Lee replaced Debicki on June 14, 2019, the same report that added Chung and Jordan Patrick Smith. Jamie Neumann, Erica Tazel and Mac Brandt came aboard on June 20, 2019, and Tony Goldwyn joined that July.
The Novel Inside the Novel
Two episodes, “I Am.” and “Jig-a-Bobo,” establish the strangest rule in the show. The Lovecraft Country novel exists in the continuity of the series. George Freeman II wrote it, fictionalizing the events of the season. His father, Atticus, retrieves it from the future and tries to change how the story ends.
That is a bold move, and it is the best idea in the season. A horror show about a Black family navigating a country built to destroy them, and the family gets a copy of the book to see how it goes. The show knows the ending is a weapon.
Atticus Freeman as he joins up with his friend Letitia and his Uncle George to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father.
Where the Season Slips
Ten episodes is a lot of ground to cover, and Lovecraft Country covers it unevenly. The middle stretch loses the road trip’s momentum and the anthology structure starts to work against the family at its center. Individual hours land hard. The connective tissue between them is thinner.
The show is produced by Monkeypaw Productions, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. That combination explains a lot about its ambition and its occasional overreach. It wants to be a historical drama, a fantasy and a horror story at once, and it mostly earns the right to try.
The Cancellation
In 2021, HBO cancelled the series while a second season, Lovecraft Country: Supremacy, was in development. That is the fact that hangs over the whole first season now. A show built around the idea that a story can be rewritten got its own story cut off before it could finish the thought.
The Supremacy season never aired. There is no second season to judge, and no way to know where Green was taking it.
What the Show Gets Right
The casting is the season’s strongest argument. Majors holds the center. Smollett-Bell gives Leti a stubbornness that keeps the road trip from becoming a tour of horrors. Williams and Ellis-Taylor give the family its history. Mosaku and Lee make the show’s strangest turns feel earned.
The premise does real work, too. Setting the monsters and the racists in the same frame is not a gimmick. It is the argument.
Why 7.9
Lovecraft Country is a better show than its uneven middle suggests and a messier one than its best episodes promise. The novel-inside-the-novel device is the kind of swing most series never attempt, and it works. The ten-episode structure does not always serve it.
The published critical score for the season is 7.9/10, with a Metacritic mark of 79/100. That feels right. This is a season worth watching for the ideas and the performances, with the understanding that the ending is not the one the show wanted.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.