The Friday the 13th Crystal Lake TV series has everything wrong with the movie-to-TV adaptation

Peacock reboots the "Friday the 13th" franchise, and the result is what this horror classic should never be: boring.

Friday the 13th proves that a movie doesn't need to be a cinematic masterpiece to become a classic horror franchise. Low-budget movie Shan S. In 1980, Cunningham brings Halloween thrills to a summer camp that prepares to reopen years after two counselors were murdered. Its design was skeletal and its performances were efficient. Its attitude to sex and drugs was as hysterical as any "just say no" after-school special. However, the film was also visually effective, moving through suspense, titillation and horror so quickly that it was impossible to watch, especially for its young, hormonal audience. What do you want to say about Friday the 13th; Not boring

So it's all the more disappointing that Crystal Lake, an eight-episode horror series that reboots the franchise about the mother of a victim turned man named Jason Voorhees, is coming. Four years in the making, it emerged from a development quagmire caused by the departure of showrunner Bryan Fuller (who previously reinvented The Silence of the Lambs franchise in his stylish crime drama Hannibal) due to creative differences with production company A24. Brad Caleb Kane, whose credits include high-quality shows like Lodge 49 and Tokyo Vice along with It: Welcome to Derry, replaces Fuller in 2024, who has retained his fiction credentials. Whatever the reason, the ultimately senseless mess shows everything wrong with TV adaptations of the horror touchstones that IP-cheating broadcasters keep turning to.

Jason's mother, Pamela, is the villain of the original film, played by Betsy Palmer, although at that point in the franchise she is known only as "Mrs. Voorhees". The boy's death by drowning in 1957, due to the negligence of the same horned counselors who would be killed the following year, cost him his mother—so much so that in the film, in a Norman-Bates-type reverse scenario, he keeps both sides of the conversation he imagines he's having with her. Mrs. Voorhees gets about 80 percent of the way into Friday the 13th and is dead a little over 10 minutes later, her head blown off in hilarious slow motion by the last daughter Alice (Adrienne King).

The show's version of Pam is a single mom in early 70s Crystal Lake, New Jersey, the small town where the eponymous camp is located. Starring Linda Cardellini, cast as a woman who is equal parts love and repressed anger, the genius of Crystal Lake, she cooks at the local camp and school by day and takes care of Jason at night. Her son is a sweet pre-teen girl who has physical differences (big, bald, bulging head) and is prone to seizures. Fiercely protective, he enrolls her at Camp Crystal Lake to keep her close, even if the cruel campers shun her. But Pam's parenting backfires with the helicopter disappearing into the lake as the two counselors she's supposed to be supervising, Claudette (Daniel Koch) and Barry (Phoenix Parnwick), go undercover to snort. Jason's only friend, an empath and outcast named Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), stumbles upon the couple and is frozen and stunned. By the time Pam realizes something is wrong, Jason has disappeared.

But a body is never found and so he is convinced that his son is not dead. Partly because of this seemingly irrational belief, and partly because he resents seeing his neighbors move on so quickly after the death of a child they treat as a freak, he can't bear to see the camp reopen next year. This is where the plot gets awkward. A pair of thugs disguised as state troopers arrive to drag Pam back to a dark past only hinted at in the first six episodes of the season. He kills them and begins a cat-and-mouse murder investigation led by the local police chief, Levon, aka Lee (William Catlett), a black cop whose race underscores his outsider status in a town full of white yokels, carrying undisclosed baggage from a bygone era in Newark. A tentative romance between Lee and a woman he doesn't realize is rooted in a petty murder. He also conveniently has a newspaper reporter sister (Devin Kessler) who helps him investigate what brought the victims to Crystal Lake.

The series moves forward from there, characterized by mild scares and semi-inventive kills, and plenty of action but little action. Kane dutifully recreates the franchise's most memorable aspects—the snake in the cabin, the sex and drug horror, the trapdoor endings. The '70s setting is exploited for subplots, from Pam's chic encounter with liberated diner resident Rita (a fun but underused Joey Soprano) to Central Casting's roving band of hippies, who serve mainly as time wasters. Stereotypes are within stereotypes. An early penultimate episode flashbacks us to the 50s, where every suburban woman's nightmare comes to life. Crystal Lake tackles a variety of themes, some implicit in the films and some not: small-town racism, fear of difference, corporate oppression, the pressure of sexism that undercuts the rage of a woman like Pam at the peril of all. Yet its engagement with these social ills rarely goes deeper than acknowledging their existence.

Maybe there's a better show buried beneath it all. A24 has a reputation for aesthetics, and while this isn't its most visually creative work, the retro VHS is well done. As she did in Dead to Me, Cardellini makes us feel the love and pain behind Pam's violence. Grace could have been a fascinating character, but she fades away in the final third of the season before her precociousness and confusion become something worth exploring. The most interesting plot twist happens in the flashback, but it is not introduced earlier.

There is no context in which Crystal Lake was satisfactory. As with many horror series (Something Very Bad Is About to Happen, Hemlock Grove), the contribution of one feature turns the plot into a chapter that never ends. And like many horror franchises (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Purge, Scream), it tries to expand on a premise that was never rich in its original incarnation and has since been exhausted by endless sequels. But Crystal Lake in particular suffers from its poor timing, coming just months after the sex and death of teenage Jane Schoenbrunn in Camp Miasma, a brilliant meditation on how the sex and violence of Friday the 13th and its ilk hit straight at the subconscious of fans who encounter them, and realize what's juvenile about them. Schoenbronn grasps something important that seems to have eluded Kane: It's not the characters or the setting or even the creativity of these games that make a slasher movie unputdownable. It's the way they make us all into Grace, forever changed by a prying sight we may not understand but can never unsee.