Last summer, Lovecraft Country arrived with a bombasically scary first episode that got viewers’ attention, mainly because the scariest aspect of it was the institutionalized racism that was around in the 1950s (and is still around today, of course). But after that premiere, it wanted to bring in more supernatural elements that diluted its message a bit. Now comes Them, from Little Marvin and Lena Waithe, taking a similar theme — the horror of racism — and setting its first season (it’s intended to be an anthology) in Compton, California in the early 1950s.
THEM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: As we hear “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” a circle wipe opens up to show a large house on a farm. The filter fades from red to daylight.
The Gist: As a woman is taking care of her youngest son, she hears a woman singing. Outside a creepy older lady is singing. She’s a stranger, but seems to know about the woman and her son, and she wants the son for herself.
The woman, Lucky Emory (Deborah Ayorinde) wakes up from this unsettling dream in the car; she’s with her husband Henry (Ashley Thomas) and daughters Ruby (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gracie (Melody Hurd), on their way to their new home. It’s 1953, Henry has gotten a new job, and the family is moving from North Carolina to Compton, California. As Henry mentions, many of their friends and family settled in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, but nearby Compton is nicer.
One thing he doesn’t mention to Lucky, though, is that they’ll be the first Black family to move into their neighborhood, in a town whose real estate contracts still have an unenforceable covenant that states that no one with African-American blood should own a home.
When Betty Wendell (Alison Pill) sees that the house across from hers has finally been sold, she pumps the realtor for information and just gets that they have two girls. When she and the other neighbors come out to see the Emorys pull into the driveway, they’re all shocked to see that their new neighbors are Black.
Lucky knows when her family is being watched, and she spends the first night at the house loading the family’s pistol. That’s when Henry tells her why they’re really in Compton. “Do you think Hazel and them chose Watts? No. That’s exactly where they want us. Who says Compton’s theirs, huh? Think everything’s theirs. Yeah, well, that shit stops here.”
Phase one of the neighborhood’s efforts to drive the Emorys out consists of all the wives sitting on folding tables with blasting radios. That doesn’t deter Lucky, but she has her own demons to face; she takes a box labeled C.E. with a child’s possessions in it and puts it in a creepy cubby hole in the basement (in the dream, she was having, she was caring for a young boy named Chester).
For phase 2, the entire neighborhood meets, with the men trying to figure out how to escalate things. Betty’s husband Clarke (Liam McIntyre) doesn’t seem to be as eager to go to the extremes some of his neighbors, and even Betty, want to do. But to Betty, the purity of their neighborhood is being threatened.
That night, Gracie is awakened by the jangling of the collar of Sargent, the family dog. She sees a creeping figure, which starts to wring her neck. When Lucky wakes her the next day, not only does Gracie have bruises on her neck but Sargent is gone.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The obvious comparison to Them is Lovecraft Country, but there are also shades of two other Jordan Peele projects — Us and Get Out — in the first episode.
Our Take: Them, created and written by Little Marvin, with Lena Waithe as one of the executive producers, doesn’t just echo Lovecraft Country because it’s about a Black family in the 1950s being haunted by racists. It also echoes the idea that it’s positioning itself as a horror series, but the horror comes less from monsters and ghosts as it does from the white people who see the Black family as a threat and try to go to extremes to eliminate them.
The first episodes are similar, in that the scenes with the most tension and scariest scenes have completely to do with the contempt and hatred the white people the Emorys encounter. And don’t get us wrong: Alison Pill’s death stares across the street to her new neighbors are creepy as hell, and the scene where Gracie is being threatened in the dark house was genuinely scary. But, coming after Lovecraft, it’s inevitable to compare the two, and it seems that the stakes on Lovecraft were much higher than they are here.
The structure of the show will go through the ten days that the Emorys spent in Compton, as the lengthy graphic at the beginning of the first episode explains. We’ll go on some side journeys, especially back to the North Carolina town the Emorys left, and we’ll likely find out the source of Lucky’s trauma. But it feels like the show is just rolling to an inevitable conclusion, where the only mystery is whether the Emorys win out or the racist neighbors do.
Perhaps the lower stakes will lead to a tighter narrative; as Lovecraft watchers remember, the plot of the series got increasingly outlandish as things went along, with the conclusion being a messy mix of the supernatural aspects of the story along with the racism the characters had to battle. Perhaps Little Marvin’s story is more of an 70/20/10 racism-supernatural-grief mix that will ground the horrors in real life. It was what we were hoping Lovecraft would be, so perhaps Them will pick up the ball that Lovecraft dropped.
We will keep following the series due to the fine acting from Ayorinde, Thomas and Pill. Ayorinde is especially adept at teetering on the edge, because we see her in scenes where she’s angry and determined and in others where she’s waving a gun at the neighborhood, and we can believe her fear and rage in both. But Thomas’ rage is quieter, as he has to deal with things like the receptionist at the aerospace firm he’s joining continuing to point him to the lunch room and not the engineering department; the way he deals with the neighbors’ desire to push them out will be interesting to watch. And Pill is just dripping with Aryan evil.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After finding Sargent’s body in the basement, Lucky walks out the door, waves her gun and screams “Stay away from my home!” The neighbors cower at the supposed “Angry Black Woman” as Henry drags her back in the house.
Sleeper Star: Basically, someone in the cast who is not the top-billed star who shows great promise.
Most Pilot-y Line: Shahadi Wright Joseph does a fine job as Ruby, the Emorys’ oldest daughter. She’s tall for her age and is likely a bit awkward, but she seems to be a pillar of strength in the family and it’ll be interesting to see how being in this new neighborhood affects her.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the Lovecraft vibes you’ll get while watching Them, it’s still a well-written and well-acted show that deserves our attention. Let’s hope it stays focused on what its primary story is.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Stream Them On Amazon Prime Video