![]() Them’s directors stage their requisite jump scares with aplomb, and both Ayorinde and Thomas deliver engaging harried-to-their-breaking-point lead performances. ![]() There’s mileage to be elicited from that idea, but over the course of its first four installments (which were all that was provided to press), the material is content to stay on the surface, alternating between scenes in which Betty fumes about the Emorys and organizes the town’s men to do something horrible about it, and Henry and Lucky have strange hallucinations (or are they?) involving blackface performers and housewives driven mad by incessant discrimination. ![]() Considering that the ensuing tale will focus on the clan’s 10-day ordeal in their new West Coast environs, it’s clear from the outset that this change of scenery will do them no good.Įvil supernatural forces are almost as plentiful in this enclave as are real-world villains, and Them’s guiding idea is that racism is a corrupting plague that drives Black people literally insane-in part because they are repeatedly informed by their tormentors that their persecution is their own fault for not being nice or accommodating or reasonable enough. The Emorys are attempting to start fresh after a terrible tragedy that, we glean from an oblique prologue, involved a menacing white woman (Dale Dickey) and her cohorts snatching their infant son Chester in broad daylight. In 1953, Henry (Ashley Thomas) and Livia “Lucky” Emory (Deborah Ayorinde), along with their two daughters Ruby ( Us star Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gracie (Melody Hurd), become part of that great migration, moving from Chatham County, North Carolina, to Compton, California. Lovecraft Country may have been a mess, but at least it was daring and unpredictable-something that can’t be said of this period-piece tale of monstrous racism.Įarly intertitles set the scene: Between 19, approximately 6 million Black Americans relocated from the rural Jim Crow South to other parts of the United States, where they hoped to find greater tolerance and opportunity. More deflating still, though, is that creator Little Marvin and executive producer Lena Waithe’s horror effort (intended to be an American Horror Story-ish anthology, with each season boasting a new narrative) also traces the same lines already recently drawn by HBO’s Lovecraft Country, to underwhelming ends. Such is the case with Them, a 10-part Amazon series (out April 9) that recycles and amalgamates many of the elements and themes of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, the latter of which is even evoked by this endeavor’s similar title. You know a director’s work has been culturally influential when, in its wake, a crop of second-rate rehashes that simplify its ideas and formulas begins materializing.
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