Potentially good

Published date11 April 2023
WHAT if a tiger came to tea? What if you won a ticket to a magical chocolate factory? What if an owl was afraid of the dark? What if a machine suddenly appeared in the grocery store of a small unassuming town overnight that was able, for $2 and your social security number and fingerprints, to tell you your true life potential

As irresistible premises go, that of The Big Door Prize is a great one. Adapted from M.O. Walsh’s 2020 novel, the 10-part series uses the (largely unexplained) existence of the machine to explore that ever-fascinating question of whether there is such a thing as too much knowledge, and how much truth humanity can bear. Is the machine a liberation or an electronic Pandora’s box?

That makes it sound weighty. It is not. It is funny, friendly and as beautifully light on its feet as you might expect from its creator, David West Read, who worked as a writer and producer on Schitt’s Creek. He is hugely helped in this by the presence and immaculate comic timing of Chris O’Dowd as amiable family man, history teacher and good whistler Dusty Hubbard. O’Dowd made his name playing quintessential beta male Roy in the The IT Crowd and is the actor you want when you need to ground any show with surreal or sci-fi elements in reality and keep emotional stakes credible.

Each episode focuses on a different member of the ordinary and ordinarily happy-enough town of Deerfield, but it is the story of Dusty and his wife, Cass (Gabrielle Dennis), that we follow throughout. We meet him on his 40th birthday — delighted with the scooter (and camo helmet) Cass has bought him and baffled by the surprise gift of a theremin, but surrounded by family and suffused with contentment. After all, now he has all he ever wanted AND a musical instrument derived from Soviet research into proximity sensors, so what, really, is there to complain about? Off he scoots, whistling, into town where all the talk is of Morpho, the fortune-telling machine.

Dusty is unsettled by the news from the off, and more so as the town transforms into a crucible filled with people testing out the potential they have been told they have. The place fills with hitherto sober citizens fancying themselves as the martial arts experts, storytellers, guitarists or simply — in the case of the...

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