(courtesy IMP Awards)
It will surprise precisely no one to say that we live in an age where it feels like everything, and we mean everything, is on frantic frenetic, screamingly loud and epic fast-forward draped in garish neon and with a thumping electrobeat pounding out of the speakers.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know since carpe diem and you only have one life and that, but there’s something information everywhere all the time that ramps up the pace and the pressure and, while it gives you lots of possibilities, insists you consider and preferably action them all at once.
We can’t do that, of course, and have to decide what is and isn’t worth our time, and what will matter to us in the long run, and this is where the gleefully meditative pleasures of the second season of The Big Door Prize come in.
In its first exemplary season, The Big Door Prize took us on what, on the surface, would seem like the wildest and most surreal of rides, leaving little time, you would think, for its characters to sit and contemplate much of anything.
But somewhere in the middle of a blue glowing machine called the Morpho appearing in the back of Mr Johnson’s (Patrick Kerr) general store which invited everyone to see what their potential was, a mysterious exercise which produced a small blue business card upon rested an occupation or state of being with little in the way of explanatory information.
With only that to go on, quite a few of the townsfolk completely upended their lives in pursuit of what they took as an edict and not a gentle suggestion, while others let their lives be disrupted in ways that produced ripples of change, the effects of which come into play in the less full-on but no less engaging second season of the show.
As the sophomore storytelling block of The Big Door Prize gets underway, high school teacher Dusty (Chris O’Dowd), who provides much-needed comic relief in amongst all the existential seriousness of much of the show, and his wife Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) are pondering a temporary future apart, an Amish Rumspringa of sorts where they can work out who they are and what they want from life outside of their long-standing marriage which they entered into when they were quite young.
There’s no doubting they love each other but life has raced on, primarily in the form of daughter Trina (Djouliet Amara) who is openly free now to pursue relationship with her dead boyfriend’s twin brother Jacob (Sammy Fourlas), and they have had much time to muse in any meaningful way about what it all means and whether they’re happy or satisfied.
Being the questioning and emotional heart of The Big Door Prize, though the show is clever and insightful enough to give other characters in the ensembles thoughtfully emotional time to think things through too, Dusty executes much of this with a great deal of awkward good humour, no better realised that when Cass is holding a “storyteller group” in her home with BFF Nat (Mary Holland) whose sudden relationship with idiosyncratically desperate Giorgio (Josh Segarra) and Dusty, whose living “separately” in the basement, makes his presence felt in the most awkwardly hilarious of ways.
This wonderfully executed scene, which bears a lot in common with many of the ones involving Giorgio who is a bundle of over the top buffoonery mixed with a truly vulnerable guy who just wants to be loved, cuts to the heart of the great dilemma swirling around The Big Door Prize.
While many of us think we’d love clear and inarguable guidance about who we are and where we should head in life, the truth of the matter is that if we were to get that, we might not be entirely sure what to do with it.
That’s certainly the case with just about everyone in the second season although some people like bar owner Hana (Ally Maki) and Mr Johnson, who is given the most achingly poignant of storylines where lost love is very much the order of the day (and rather beautifully a quiet acceptance that you can’t do much about changing the past) who are so connected to the Morpho, in ways they don’t understand, that they blue dots on their body (so do Cass and Dusty and some others but why? No one knows).
Without giving too much away, The Big Door Prize seems to indicate in Mr Johnson’s evocatively touching storyline that it is possible to reach a point of resolution, something that he is spurred on to do when in these first four episodes, Morpho enigmatically asks people if their ready for the next stage.
Here’s where more information gets provided, much of it seeming to point to the fact that actual quantifiable steps need to be taken and that the time for rumination is over; some characters get the hint, some don’t, but through these four funny and touching episodes, where languid, introspective conversation is the quietly intimate order of the day, underscore what makes this show so very good.
It’s precisely because even with so many huge questions on the table, The Big Door Prize is happy to take the time to let its characters do their thing, to talk and laugh and cry and make some fairly profound mistakes and to be gloriously and fallibly human.
Sure they have this weird blue glowing box of predicative strangeness staring at them, giving them possible pointers to their future selves and activities, but it doesn’t relieve of the need to actually live life, with all the uncertainty that brings, and it’s that very act of having to be human, even cards of fate burning a quandary of a hole in their hands, that makes these people so compelling to watch.
That, and they are so damn funny much of the time, stumbling around like desperate newborns trying to figure it all out; but that’s where The Big Door Prize excels too because it doesn’t make fun of them and their deep, thoughtful, involved conversations but rather gives them to do some quite ordinary things in the face of an extraordinary ongoing development and it’s this raw, amusing, vulnerable, awkward humanity that fills and enlivens a show which is quite comfortable, yes, even in the mad busyness of the present, taking its time to get to the mystery not just of the machine but of what it means to be human and alive.
The Big Door Prize is streaming on AppleTV+