REVIEWED: SEASON 1 (ALL EPISODES) | WHERE TO WATCH: APPLE TV+

The problem, in a nutshell, with this high profile reboot of the Steven Spielberg 1980s anthology series (the first five episodes of which are available now, the remaining five later in the year) is the stories really aren’t that amazing. But then a series entitled Mundane Stories isn’t likely to get punters reaching for their credit cards to subscribe to Apple’s streaming service. The original series, which ran from 1985 to 1987, never really took flight but those who remember its 45-episode run (the show was cancelled after its second season, having never made much of an impact) are more likely to recall its unfussy amiability rather than its determination to challenge its audience by taking them to the dark and dangerous corners of their imaginations. This reboot series – Spielberg is still on board as an executive producer – arrives at a time when it’s hard to turn on your TV without falling over an anthology show, and where most of them are busy dealing, often obliquely, with contemporary issues and fears or just determined to try and frighten the Bejesus out of the audience, Amazing Stories is content to just do what it always did; it’s very nice. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a show aiming for that elusive ‘family’ audience but certainly, on the evidence of these first five episodes, Amazing Stories is going to need to try a little harder and be a little bolder if it’s going to hold its own in a TV world much busier and far more impatient than the world it inhabited in the 1980s.

There is, however, something rather charming in the show’s naivety and its cheeriness and its shameless reuse of the hoariest of old genre clichés with no intention or desire to do anything remotely new with them. In its first episode ‘The Cellar’, for example, a young builder renovating a dilapidated old house out in the country finds himself whisked back in time 100 years during a thunderstorm whereupon he embarks upon a romance with the house’s previous owner without really sparing much of a thought for exactly why and how he has travelled in time or how he is going to get back. It’s saccharine-sweet, effortlessly watchable but utterly forgettable and throwaway. ‘The Heat’ demonstrates the show’s commendably diverse credentials in an episode that is basically Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in running shoes as a promising athlete is killed in a traffic accident but returns as a ghost, invisible to everyone and barely able to communicate with her friend, to tidy up some unfinished business. Episode three is the show’s only real clunker; ‘Dynoman and the Volt!’ promises more than it can ever deliver, prime Spielbergian schmaltz in which a grandson and grandfather bond when the old man (the final screen appearance from Robert Forster) is gifted superpowers. Just when it looks as if Amazing Stories is far too sickly for our gritty 21st-century sensibilities, the show perks up a little in its final couple of episodes for now. ‘Signs of Life’ (appropriately) has some moments of proper tension and edginess as a woman emerges from a long coma and her daughter quickly realises that she’s not the same person she was. The resolution won’t surprise anyone and the upbeat conclusion is eye-rollingly sentimental but the narrative has a decent pulse to it and the central mystery, as plain as day to those even vaguely familiar with the genre, makes for acceptable feel-good viewing. Best of the bunch, however, is ‘The Rift’ which genuinely looks and feels like a lost episode from the 1980s series. Here, a US pilot from the 1940s crashes in Ohio in 2020, having fallen through a temporal rift which, the story tells us, has been responsible for untold ‘natural disasters’ across the ages. A special Government agency is responsible for ensuring that whatever comes through the rift goes right back in order to avoid further cataclysmic disruption, but the pilot and the young family he has befriended have other ideas. Yet again there’s really not one original idea in the whole episode but it’s hard to be sniffy about an hour of television that’s so shamelessly retro and so determined to leave its audience with a warm glow rather than the slightly dread feeling of apprehension and terror most other modern anthology shows are aiming for.

Amazing Stories is to be guardedly admired for ploughing a furrow so different to its bedfellows and there’s no reason a genre show shouldn’t try to uplift rather than unsettle. To that end Amazing Stories does its job well enough. But there are ways this can be done with stories that aren’t quite so achingly cliched and which demonstrate such a callous disinterest in and disregard for originality and, at times, their own internal logic. Amazing Stories may well be kicking against the gloomy, dystopian tone of modern anthology TV, but if it’s to hold its head above water and justify its existence, it needs to at least try to be a bit more amazing and significantly less unexceptional.