Review: 'Hysteria!

While it's an issue whose cultural importance had faded into nothingness by the end of the 20th Centuray, there was a time when the fear of Satan and a believed prevalence of hidden Satanic messages in popular music was an incredibly popular concern. Preachers would play records backwards, claiming to hear some secret masked message from the Dark Side. 

And this was not a belief that left room for much satire. As a kid barely out of high school, I was fired from my first Top 40 radio job after the program director heard a bit of mine in which I argued there were secret messages from Satan embedded in The Captain & Tennille hit "Muskrat Love."

So that time of cultural paranoia would seem the perfect fit for a streaming series to both spoof the concerns from back then, while also telling the smaller story of a heavy metal band caught up in the often irrational emotions of the time. Peacock's new series Hysteria! certainly tries to dive right into that approach, but the show is a dizzying mix of conflicting tones that makes it feel as if it was three or four different shows that were mashed up into one uneven season.

Creator Matthew Scott Kane sets the series in Happy Hollow, Michigan in 1989 and the show focuses on the hapless heavy metal band Dethkrunch, whose three members are struggling to get anyone to pay attention to them. Dylan (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and Spud (Kezii Curtis) are high school outcasts who are about as heavy metal as Huey Lewis & The News. Their band is more loser cosplay than an actual musical idea and they seem destined to cruise through their high school years entirely unnoticed.



But when the popular high school football captain's body is found ritually mutilated, the event rocks the town and prompts the uber-conservatively religious Tracy (Anna Camp) to warn town folks that Satan has infested their little slice of heaven.

However, Dylan sees the uproar as a branding opportunity and he convinces his two band buddies to lean into a vaguely Satanic reboot of Dethkrunch. And as they say, hijinks commence.

My fairly straightforward recap of the first bit of Hysteria! provides a much more understandable recounting of the plot than you'll discover when you watch the show. Sometimes it's a sardonic take on fear and mass hysteria, other times it's a comedy with an uneven approach to delivering a punchline. And sometimes you'll watch extended part of the series and just confusingly mutter "Huh."

Bruce Campbell appears as the town's sheriff and surprisingly delivers a fairly subdued and "normal" performance. Which is an unexpected move although it's also unsettling to watch him move calmly through scenes that are otherwise bat shit crazy.

And as has been the case with several other recent Peacock scripted shows, Hysteria! doesn't just jump the rails in the final couple of episodes, it crashes through some homes and demolishes part of the town. I'm not going to spoil anything by being more specific. But while I was perplexed and often frustrated by the first few episodes of the show, I truly loathed where it ended up by the end.

I applaud Matthew Scott Kane for taking a big swing with Hysteria! But I wish things could have been trimmed and dialed back a bit because there is a really solid show in there waiting to come out. Sadly, what is on the screen is more infuriating than worth recommending.