Lovecraft Country: What the Must Watch reviewers think

Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.

This week, Hayley Campbell and Scott Bryan share their thoughts on Lovecraft Country.

Based on the 2016 novel of the same name and inspired by the world of HP Lovecraft, the Sky Atlantic horror-drama sees Atticus Black set out on a road trip across racially segregated America, to look for his missing father.

Have you been watching it? What did you think? Leave your comments below...

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Scott says: "It starts with one of the most creatively bizarre TV moments"

“It starts with one of the most surreal, ridiculous scenes of TV I have seen in years - a scene from the Korean War, you see people fighting each other on both sides, but then you see space aliens and it zooms out to a baseball player whose hitting aliens with bats.

"Genuinely, it’s one of the most creatively bizarre moments of TV that immediately grabs you!

“You then realise it’s a dream sequence and it flashes back to 1950s America and from that point it goes in a completely different trajectory than what you might have expected.

"I have never seen something that manages to be from the outset immediately paranormal, then so realistic at portraying that era in a very short space of time. It manages to do both things really, really well.”

Hayley says: "They're turning over the idea that we can love someone's work yet struggle with the damage of their politics"

"I’m a fan of HP Lovecraft and, like a lot of fans, I have had to wrestle with who he was and what he believed and wrote. On the one hand he wrote incredibly imaginative and strange science fiction stories, full of beasts and demons and unnameable blobs, and he has a way of writing about fear and dread that is so effective.

"But he was also a huge racist and wrote some very hateful things: the kind of stuff that doesn’t get collected in a book of short stories about monsters, the kind of thing you only find out about later when you decide that you like him and you go looking for other stuff he's done.

"That’s the idea that they’re turning over in this show: the idea that we can love someone's work and also struggle with the very real damage of their politics. It’s based on a novel by Matt Ruff, who wrote it as a dark fantasy which therefore exists within the same genre as Lovecraft’s work. It’s exploring where Lovecraft sits in this world, given everything. I haven’t seen anything like it but, at least in the first episode, the supernatural horror comes very much secondary to the real one of racism."

Lovecraft Country is available now on Sky On Demand and Now TV.

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