Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Teacup’ on Peacock, A Horror Series With Creeping Dread On Offer

In Teacup , a six-episode horror series now streaming on Peacock , a family on a farm/veterinary clinic in rural Georgia finds their already fraught internal dynamic agitated by new visitors to the area no one saw coming. Created and written by Ian McCulloch and exec produced by James Wan – he knows a thing or two about horror – Teacup is based on Robert R. McCammon’s 1988 hit horror novel Stinger , and stars Yvonne Strahovski, Scott Speedman, Kathy Baker, Chaske Spencer, Rob Morgan, Boris McGiver, Émilie Bierre, and Alice Kremelberg.

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Opening Shot: Birdsong and mist an empty wood, until it isn’t. A woman is out there, hysterical and bloodied, and she rubs her zip-tied bindings desperately against a sharp rock.

The Gist: “I told you. I’m not ready to talk.” For Maggie Chenoweth (Strahovski) and her husband James (Speedman), infidelity has made the vibe around their remote farmhouse tense. While James’s mother Ellen (Baker) smokes medicinal grass, and teenage daughter Meryl (Bierre) is lost in her studies and earbuds, Maggie entertains her thoughtful little son Arlo (Caleb Dolden) with the catch and release of a dragonfly. Under the teacup against a window pane, he’s a tempest. But out in the sky over the Chenoweths’ sprawling farm property, the fly is free to roam.

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Something has the animals in the barnyard spooked, and Arlo decides to follow a scampering goat into the nearby woods. But before his parents can tell him that’s probably a bad idea – the lady we saw earlier is out there, though no one knows that yet – the neighbors show up with a hurt horse of their own. While Ruben Shanley (Spencer) assists veterinarian Maggie with treatment, James and Valeria Shanley (Diany Rodriguez) hunt for Arlo in the woods one way, while Meryl and the Shanleys’ son Nicholas (Luciano Leroux) hunt the other. Where did he run off to? What spooked the horses? And why are all of the adults on edge?

Arlo’s eventual encounter with the woman in the woods strongly suggests that things around here are about to get nuts. “Murder-maker!” she cries over and over. “ Ayudar ! Help me!” And when leans over the boy to stare into his eyes, something passes between them, like a prism in motion. With more neighbors arriving – Donald (McGiver) brought his assault rifle – word is there’s a rabid animal roving the area. And that could very well be true. But that’s not the whole story in Teacup . Even if the series doesn’t immediately reveal the entirety of what has now spooked the humans as well as the animals in the area, it is unequivocally in creep out mode from its very first moments. “Buzz-goat, wasp-find, men-strange, murder-maker!”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If you’re building a Spooky Season playlist, Teacup needs to be on it. But so should the starkly animated new series Uzumaki (Max), about people in a small town start to get crazy with the appearance of mysterious spiral shapes. And speaking of families on edge, what about Them on Prime Video?

Our Take: In the first episode of Teacup , Yvonne Strahvoski and Scott Speedman establish the arc of an entire fracturing marriage in the space of just two or three lines. The tension is there, so palpable between them it’s as if their animals understand it, too. We’re really looking forward to finding out how their fraught dynamic changes as the real depth of the threat to their family and friends in the area is more thoroughly revealed. Teacup is already working confidently with one of the horror genre’s perennially best assets: when a newfound sense of dread and harm that seems to consume everything in its path is so powerful, it has the ability to hoover up the regular, everyday dread that was already there.

What’s also a draw here is the half-hour episodic run-time. Not because of some go-go modernness, but because horror stuff – especially horror stuff on television – can have a tendency to lurk and lurch and otherwise drag toward its big reveals and jump scare frights. What we’re saying is, this Halloween season, why not get at it right quick? Throw us into the mix, just like Teacup does in the early going, where we have a handle on the Chenoweths as a family before we ever get to the weird and crazy, which only makes the weird and crazy more palpable as what they’re actually up against begins to emerge. Just like grabbing the best candy in a bowl, we like a little instant gratification with our spook-ernatural frights.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Uh-oh. As if the Chenoweth property wasn’t already on edge, with disappearing children and a host of spooked animals, now a new threat is in the vicinity. We’ll call him Gas Mask Man…

Sleeper Star: Chaske Spencer is only in a few scenes in the early going of Teacup , but he brings an interesting mix of easygoingness and intensity. (Spencer was also great in The English , a criminally underseen Western miniseries on Prime Video that also starred Emily Blunt.)

Most Pilot-y Line: The first time we hear a cryptic repeated mantra in Teacup , it goes a little something like this: “Gunshot… calmate …gunshot… calmate …men-strange…murder-maker… ¡ Ella esta mintiendo !”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hey, this thing is creepy. Teacup thrusts us into the everyday life of a family who must navigate their own internal problems as the world around them becomes increasingly unsettling. And weird! And probably morebloody!

Johnny Loftus ( @glennganges ) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.

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