Two dollars don’t go as far as they used to, but in one grocery store in an unassuming American town, it’s enough to buy you a life’s calling.
The Big Door Prize, a new middlebrow concept-driven comedy on Apple TV Plus, follows the residents of Deerfield after a strange machine reveals their “true life potential” for a very reasonable price. Despite the premise, the 10-part series scarcely qualifies as sci-fi. It seems far less interested in the hows and whys of the destiny generator than using it as a plot device through which to broach everyday concerns: mid-life awakenings and regrets, the need for validation, the burden of promise and the conflict between passion, purpose and pragmatism.
In other hands — say those of Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker — this might have played out as a dark dive into the pits of human dissatisfaction. Instead this amiable, if undemanding, show is more reminiscent of the gently philosophical The Good Place or the feelgood small-town sitcom Schitt’s Creek, on which series creator David West Read worked as a writer and producer.
While each episode looks at a different character’s response to their “potential” revelation, the series keeps checking in on the story of a husband and wife introduced in the first two episodes. They are Dusty (Chris O’Dowd) and Cass (Gabrielle Dennis), whose 23 years of contented coupledom begins to crack after they get wildly different results. He, an unadventurous high school teacher and amateur whistler, is told his calling is to be a teacher/whistler; she, a restless creative with frustrated dreams, is given a card that simply says “royalty”.
Although there’s an emotional rawness to a couple finally articulating that they want different things from life, the show keeps things warm and light, thanks in no small part to O’Dowd’s outsized charisma. Like Dusty, however, the show could perhaps do more to push itself, to raise the narrative stakes and avoid coasting on its quirky charm. But complacency aside, The Big Door Prize certainly seems to have some potential.
★★★☆☆
Episodes 1-3 streaming on Apple TV Plus from March 29. New episodes released weekly
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