The Good, the Bad, and the Grotesque of ‘Lovecraft Country’
The show’s first season raised many questions — chief among them being ‘does it actually care about Black people?’
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Before it even premiered in August, HBO’s Lovecraft Country promised to be ambitious — in its process if not its story. The series is based on a 2016 novel by a White author (Matt Ruff), set in the Jim Crow era, riffing on the language and tropes of horror writer and noted racist H.P. Lovecraft, now in the hands of Black creators (Underground’s Misha Green as showrunner, with Jordan Peele executive-producing). Even in the adaptation-happy streaming era, that’s a lot of adapting.
The result wrapped on Sunday with a frenetic, scatterbrained finale reflecting a roller-coaster season that jostled viewers’ sensibilities by the hour. The show’s main squad — Atticus (Tic), Leti, Ruby, George, Hippolyta, and Dee — began their adventures in 1950s Chicago with the singular mission of rescuing Tic’s father, Montrose, from a White magical order in the Massachusetts boondocks. Along the way, the crew exorcises White demons, destroys White nationalists’ property, and magically turns the city of Chicago and a…
