The golden age of TV is something that’s a little hard to define, and different people will claim it’s already been and gone, but I’d argue we’re in the middle of one right now. Certainly, it feels like a whole heap of streaming platforms and networks have realised that people have a huge appetite for TV tie-ins to franchises they know and love.
Case in point – It: Welcome to Derry, which has been getting steadily teased for a few months now, including a very recent second teaser that seems to be easily long enough to warrant the full-on “trailer” label. It gives us our most detailed look yet at the horrifying origin story that preceded It.
It rewinds us to 1962, a whole heap of time before the events of the mainline movies (and book), telling the story of Derry back when it was first in the grips of the evil clown Pennywise. That means an all-new cast of kids who are likely to slowly uncover that demon’s malevolent influence.
They’ll do so with the help of a new family who’s moved into the area, and it’s pretty clear that the show isn’t going to skirt around the politics of the era, when there was still widespread resistance to concepts of racial diversity. After all, in 1962 there were still a few years to go before the end of Jim Crow laws.
Image 1 of 5
One key bit of news for those who loved the two (hugely successful) It movies is that Bill Skarsgård is returning as Pennywise himself, after he so memorably inhabited the role in the films. We don’t know how much he’ll feature, of course, and the show’s likely to follow the same pattern as the films – which means keeping him in the wings to a degree, so that the closing stages can go a bit more buck-wild.
There’s every chance this’ll be a huge hit for HBO, coming off the back of some films that went hard at the box office. That said, they were a few years ago, so it’ll be curious to see how that fandom reacts. Either way, it’s a big bonus for HBO as it rolls HBO Max out to more and more countries.
