25 Best TV Shows Similar to Tales from the Neverending Story
The Big Door Prize
In Season 1, The Big Door Prize felt like a cracked mirror version of a small-town Stephen King story. When the Morpho Machine—a device that spits out a card revealing the user’s “potential”—arrives in Deerfield, it does indeed disrupt life. However, most Deerfield residents are nice. Or, at least, they're not mean in the “could be tempted by Randall Flagg or Leland Gaunt” way. As a result, the disruptions were more of a “the principal buys a motorcycle” and “that dad grieving the death of his son declares himself sheriff without ever abusing power.” No escalating series of pranks culminating in out-and-out bloodshed or betraying one’s former friends to the dark embodiment of evil found here. For those expecting The Big Door Prize Season 2 to start stacking the bodies like cordwood, I have bad news. It keeps the King’s small-town vibes without wandering into King’s “the secrets we keep will literally tear us apart” territory. Opening moments after Season 1’s end, the Morpho machine has stopped spitting out cards, instead offering the town folk a move to the next level. While the result is, essentially, yet another projective test, the results bring a distinctly different flavor to the mix. While the series retains a certain goofiness, it also gains a sadder complexity. The longer we look at the characters, the more forced their good-time silliness becomes. Instead of the exception, Season 1's Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) centric fourth episode feels more like Season 2’s template. Mary Holland and Josh Segarra nail the couples' costumes category. (AppleTV+) To find that tone, the series does reshuffle its character decks. Many of the students we met last year are nowhere to be seen, for instance. New characters are introduced, including a music teacher played by Justine Lupe. Others, like Cass’s (Gabrielle Dennis) best friend Nat (Mary Holland), get a much bigger spotlight. The overall result gives the series a stronger ensemble feel, even if it is not necessarily without downsides. Continue Reading →
Franklin
Michael Douglas's career so deeply connects him to as specific kind of late 20th/early 21st Century man. As a result, throwing him back to the 18th Century and into the body of Benjamin Franklin feels deeply counterintuitive. It is not surprising that Franklin—an adaptation of the book A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff—is one of the few period projects Douglas has done, joining the likes of The Ghost and the Darkness and those flashback scenes in the Ant-Man films. What is surprising, and to the series’ credit, is how quickly that strangeness recedes. It isn’t that Douglas manages to fade into the role of Franklin until he disappears entirely, but he does manage to recede enough that he doesn’t disrupt the show’s reality. In some ways, Douglas proves a surprisingly apt selection. No stranger to playing womanizers on screen, Douglas easily finds the correct valence to portray Franklin’s specific flavor of late 18th-century skirt chaser. The metacommentary works in his favor as well, an aging icon who retains much of his skill but perhaps can no longer command the same buzz or box office returns embodying an aging icon whose mind remains sharp but whose body—and possibly will—has been beaten up by life and time. While almost a decade older than the Franklin he’s portraying, Douglas also excels at the moments where the audience witnesses the statesman energized like old times. Thibault de Montalembert has neither the time nor the interest in your lame attempts at Call My Agent/Dix pour cent joke attempts. (AppleTV+) Still, the script too frequently hamstrings the actor. Not bad by any means, the writing still suffers for trying to match Franklin’s reputation. It’s the old conundrum of trying to build a series, film, or play around a singular piece of art. How does a creator convince the audience that someone is singing the most fantastic song ever without truly writing the most fantastic song ever? Similarly, how do writers provide dialogue to what is, by historical reputation, one of the greatest wits in American History without simply quoting his greatest hits? Continue Reading →
Manhunt
Making Abraham Lincoln or Hamish Linklater the least interesting thing about your television series is no easy feat. That's especially the case when it features Linklater playing the 16th President of the United States. Yet, somehow, the Monica Beletsky-created MANHUNT, adapted from the James L. Swanson tome of the same name, manages to do just that. And that is 100 percent a compliment. Often forgotten is that Lincoln was not John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle) and his co-conspirators’ only target. The schemers also marked Vice President Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower, an acting veteran turning in his best work.) and Secretary of State William Seward (Larry Pine) as targets. (The series additionally implies that the show’s lead, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies), may have been on that list, but that doesn’t appear in historical texts.) By opening on the far larger plot that almost immediately unraveled due to bungling and cold feet, MANHUNT quickly asserts its intentions. While catching Booth is the series’ splashiest element, it is certainly not all it has on its mind. Tobias Menzies has hat, will travel. (AppleTV+) If anything, the eponymous search provides the show a means of taking stock of America immediately after the Civil War. Ping-ponging around in time, Manhunt provides a glimpse of how a collection of Americans experienced life after General Lee’s surrender. The derailing of a far more extensive restructuring of America feels every bit as mourned here as the fallen President. Continue Reading →
Apples Never Fall
The expression, “The book was better,” has become a truism in adaptation, an assumption where the few exceptions only prove the rule. But what’s a creator to do when the source material is deeply flawed? If you’re Apples Never Fall creator Melanie Marnich, you make several cosmetic changes to Liane Moriarty’s novel. The drama moves from Australia to West Palm Beach. The four Delaney children—Troy (Jake Lacy), Brooke (Essie Randles), Amy (Alison Brie), and Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner)—are no longer uniformly tall and olive-skinned. Quite the opposite, really, on the skin tone front. Relationships are shuffled a bit. Unfortunately, these changes fail to elevate the series. The broad strokes of the plot itself are intriguing. The Delaney parents Joy (Annette Bening) and Stan (Sam Neill) have finally retired from a lifetime of running a tennis center, including their own stints as players and coaches. Rather than a delightful occasion, it churns up all manner of unprocessed relationship issues. Stan is cantankerous and competitive, oscillating between diminishing everyone around him with words and beating them all over the court. Joy, on the other hand, expected to spend her golden years catching up with her children, who lack the time or interest in doing the same. Continue Reading →
One Day at a Time
Netflix’s new romance limited series offers a thoughtful, warm adaptation of the 2009 novel. The hook of author David Nicholls’ 2009 novel is irresistible. Readers catch up with two former classmates who are something more than friends but not quite lovers on the same day, July 19, every year from 1988 to 2008. It’s no wonder it has managed two adaptations in the 15 years since its release—first as a 2011 movie directed by Lone Scherfig from a script by Nicholls himself and now as a limited series created by Nicole Taylor, with only one Nicholls’ script among the fourteen episodes. Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) is handsome, charismatic, and just rich enough not to worry about making a plan for his future. Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) is also quite attractive—although she can’t (or won’t) see it—and from a working-class background that makes her feel as though she can’t pursue her clear goal for the future: to become a writer. They travel in different circles, but on the night of graduation, they end up falling into her bed. While they kiss plenty, it never goes further, Emma preferring to chat despite her massive and evident crush on Dexter. Continue Reading →
Reacher
The Prime series remains its big, fun, very violent self. Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson), the “has toothbrush, will travel” man, has returned to television and not a moment too soon. Reacher Season 2 is exactly the kind of low-commitment viewing one craves as the year ends and the holidays overtake everyone’s lives. While a large, jolly man busies himself filling many of our stockings, who better to enjoy than a large, angry man knocking bad guys out of their socks? Especially when, like this time, it’s personal! Reacher and Neagly (Maria Sten, back from Season 1 and fully second on the callsheet this time, thankfully) first met when they were members of the 110, an investigative military police unit. As seen in flashback, the group is the last time Reacher had anything approaching a stable group of friends. In the present day, several team members have gone missing, suggesting that perhaps someone is targeting them. Reacher connects with Neagly and the two join up with the only other two 110 members they can find. O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos) is the unit clown and womanizer turned family man and inside the beltway fixer. Dixon (Serinda Swan) is a forensic accountant/warrior who shares an obvious but unconsummated crush with Reacher. Continue Reading →
Slow Horses
The AppleTV+ spy series retains its humor but gives viewers its most tightly plotted effort yet. Slow Horses Season 3 reiterates how the series differs from so many other TV shows. While critics frequently discuss film as a director’s medium, television tends to be more showrunner—and thus writer—driven. While Horses indeed derives many of its pleasures from the writers—the returning trio of Will Smith, Jonny Stockwood, and Mark Denton once again man the pens—each season’s unique tone owes to its single director. James Hawes made the series’ debut season a workplace comedy where the occasional gun battle might break out. Season 2 darkened or ditched much of the comedy for a bleaker, higher action affair under the direction of Jeremy Lovering. In Slow Horses Season 3, Saul Metzstein doesn’t push the team back into the offices. If anything, Slough House appears even less than in Season 2. However, he does re-up some of the mismatched colleagues’ humor, particularly when it comes to the team’s most recent additions, gambling addict Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan) and drug addict Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards). He also further deepens the emotional stakes with a light touch, adding depth to ever-growing complications. Continue Reading →
All the Light We Cannot See
Early in For All Mankind Season 4, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Dani Poole (Krys Marshall) reencounter each other for the first time in years on the Happy Valley Mars base. Smiling warmly, each says, “Hi, Bob,” to each other. For fans of the show, it has an immediate impact. The significance of the silly greeting reminds those audience members of the deep bond between these two astronauts. Newcomers likely won’t grasp the specifics of the importance, but Marshall and Kinnaman’s performances make it quite clear that it isn’t some random bit of silliness. Continue Reading →
Goosebumps
Do we need another live-action Goosebumps adaptation? After a ’90s Fox Kids series and a pair of 2010s films, one would assume that the ground of turning Slappy the dummy and other frightening beings into flesh-and-blood creations has been well-trodden. Continue Reading →
Lessons in Chemistry
Despite the lead character’s penchant for brutal honesty and empirical truths, Lessons in Chemistry is not a series viewers should turn to for a gritty look at early 60s gender relations, race relations, or workers’ rights. That’s not to say the word of the Lee Eisenberg-created series—adapted from a Bonnie Garmus novel of the same name—exists in a conflict-free world. It’s there’s a bittersweet gentleness that underpins and surrounds the proceedings, conflicts and all. Continue Reading →
Wilderness
Some find entertainment without characters to like a difficult slog. Those individuals would do well to avoid Wilderness, a series almost entirely devoid of likable major characters. The one possible exception of note, the lead couple’s neighbor Ash (Morgana Van Peebles), will ultimately depend on how individuals feel about the morality of blatantly hitting on a married woman who isn’t exactly in the best headspace. Continue Reading →
The Wheel of Time
Big-budget fantasy lovers have reason to celebrate this week with Amazon Studio’s The Wheel of Time Season 2's debut. With some careful tweaking by Showrunner Rafe Judkins, Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy of feminine magic and quests of destiny came to life in an impressive if uneven first season. Now, the stakes are higher, the dangers subtler, and the ever-expanding cast of characters more compelling. Continue Reading →
Justified: City Primeval
How does anyone justify a revival? The original Justified gave viewers a conclusion in the first 30 minutes and an epilogue with the last 16. It gave Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) a fitting third act, living in Miami as a part-time dad to his daughter and finally enjoying freedom from the town he worked so hard to escape. So how does a creative team go from “we dug coal together?” to that nearly happy ending to a brand-new Givens tale? The simple answer is to head north. Continue Reading →
Good Omens
The 2019 adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel Good Omens was a charming show that succeeded in translating the book’s strengths and weaknesses to the small screen. It was clever like the book, with an ingenious plot (what if there had been a mix-up at the hospital and the Antichrist went home with the wrong family) that parodied The Omen while conjuring an apocalyptic tale all its about an angel and demon whose millennials-long rivalry grew from mutual antagonism, to grudging respect, and finally admiration and even a kind of love. But it also carried over the book’s weaker elements, its wonky pacing, plurality of uninteresting characters, and the fact that the first two thirds of the story is essentially table setting for the final third. Continue Reading →
Survival of the Thickest
In 1995, way back last century, I went shopping for a dress to wear to my cousin’s wedding. Accompanied by my mother, it soon became apparent to us both that I, both a big and tall girl, wouldn’t be able to buy a dress in the Juniors section. My options eventually whittled down to one adult black velvet dress that, while the saleswoman assured us was totally chic for weddings, nevertheless showcased to the world that I could not fit into a fun or stylish dress for someone my age and that’s rough. It’s very rough. Continue Reading →
The Witcher
The Witcher returns for its third season, Henry Cavill’s final run as Geralt of Rivera, Witcher, before Liam Hemsworth steps into the White Wolf’s big boots. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich introduces yet another tonal shift to the series, which has suffered a bit of an identity crisis since its bombastic first season. After the uneven season two and the head-scratching prequel spinoff Blood Origins, Season three takes a step back from intricate political intrigue to deliver a more straightforward narrative. Continue Reading →
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan
Generally speaking, we avoid personalizing our reviews at The Spool. This isn’t the early 2000s. No one needs to know about my journey to my couch to watch Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Season 4. That said, please allow me a brief personal indulgence that I promise will prove illustrious. In an effort to get ahead of deadlines, I watched the season’s six episodes in a day with a plan to write the review the next day. However, by the time I sat down to write that review about 26 hours later, I realized I had to watch the whole thing again. In a day’s time, I had forgotten too much to write a review in good faith. Continue Reading →
A Infância de Romeu e Julieta
If you’re a Shakespeare purist, Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 rendition of Romeo and Juliet might make your skin itch. Luhrmann’s signature frenetic style would seem ill-suited to the most famous romantic tragedy of all time, and, indeed, the traditional text recited in a hyper-contemporary setting, where even the Priest has a giant Celtic cross tattooed on his back, is often jarring. But it turned out to be a perfect fit to illustrate the noisy melodrama of first love and was one of the most successful films in the 90s trend of stylish, modernized adaptations of the Bard. Despite its detractors, it became, for Millennials and Gen Z, the most beloved, familiar rendition of it, even used as a supplement in schools. Continue Reading →
The Peripheral
North Carolina, 2032. Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a skilled gamer. Pro gaming (usually helping some rich schmucks win victories they couldn't on their own) is a viable way for her and her cyborg'd-former-Marine brother Burton (Jack Reynor) to earn extra cash. They live with their ailing mother Ella (Melinda Page Hamilton) a half-step ahead of financial ruin in a town more or less run by spiritual-cousin-to-Road-House-villain-Brad-Wesley Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum, Westworld). Continue Reading →
Dexter
It is difficult to imagine the people who, after Dexter’s largely despised series finale, felt that more Dexter would solve the problem. When you recall the last season of Dexter was also largely despised, it becomes even more challenging. Add in that, for many, the writing on the wall started even earlier, and it becomes damn near impossible. And yet, here is Dexter: New Blood. Continue Reading →