While I suspect most of you will be watching the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA March Madness tournament this weekend (I literally googled “what sports are on this weekend” to get to that conclusion), you may still have some time to head out to the motion pictures or change over to a different streaming app for other sorts of entertainment. To that end, here is some info about a few new things available for your viewing pleasure. 

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen (Netflix) 

Created by the elaborately named Haley Z. Boston, this horror mini-series is produced by the Duffer Brothers, the dopes who turned Stranger Things from a quaint and engaging throwback exercise to a cloying superhero adventure about a band of twenty-somethings stuck in high school. If that deters you from watching this new show, I understand. But SVBIGTH (rolls off the tongue) is a very different show indeed. For one thing, it has an actual planned ending that has been filmed and is part of the eight episodes now available in Dr. Sarandos’s Cabinet of Curiosities. That helps! But also it is about grownups, and is genuinely spooky, and concers complicated matters of love and commitment that are, yes, well worn, but are approached at least somewhat novelly here. 

Camila Morrone, perhaps best known for Daisy Jones and the Six and briefly dating Leonardo DiCaprio, plays a bride-to-be heading to the snowy, wooded estate where her fiancé’s family is waiting to meet her and to see her get married. It’s going to be a whirlwind week, already stressful enough. But, as the title suggests, something wicked her way is coming (rolls off the tongue), further complicating the whole affair. Morrone is great at playing a self-possessed enough person who nonetheless watches in mounting alarm as the plans for her special day are clawed away and she begins to doubt her commitment to her cute, slightly beta beau (Adam DiMarco, whom I’d let roll off my ton— sorry). 

The mythology of the series gets a bit muddled, and I’m still of the mind that a filmed horror story probably shouldn’t be eight hours long—no matter what Mike Flanagan tries to tell us. But I had a good time with this anyway. Of the myriad riffs on Get Out that have lurched their way into existence over the last decade, this show is among the better and more inventive. It’s stylishly shot, mostly well acted (Jennifer Jason Leigh is a tad hammy for my taste, tbh; and Jeff Wilbusch, who plays the family’s eldest boy, has a really hard time with his American accent), and the gradual reveal of what it’s about is satisfying until it gets bogged down in some logic loops. For a Netflix original series, though, it has panache and heralds the arrival of some promising new talent.