Bruce Campbell in Peacock’s Satanic Panic Comedy

If you’re a circumspect first-time TV creator given vaguely free rein, you have two choices (for the purposes of this exercise).

One, you can render your vision in the most easily digestible way possible, to make a series that is clearly promotable and satisfyingly resolved, in the hopes of engineering a hit and getting to make other shows in the future.

Or two, you can throw every idea in your brain in the general vicinity of the screen, aware that success is never guaranteed and you may never have another shot.

Sure, the result of the second course of action might be complete and utter chaos that audiences won’t know how to process and networks won’t know how to sell. Still, at least you’ll get the satisfaction of knowing you left nothing on the table.

Peacock‘s Hysteria! is a difficult to explain. It’s a series that is apparently impossible for Peacock to market — no trailer or piece of advertising that I’ve seen effectively captures any aspect of the plot or tone — and, in the eight-episode balance, frequently unsatisfying to watch. Yet in its mayhem is either an admirable refusal to compromise or an inept inability to consolidate. I actually think you can suspect the latter and still give creator Matthew Scott Kane some credit for the former, because there’s a version of this project with the rough edges all sanded off that could tie everything together in a neat bow and probably find a bigger audience. But where would the ambition be in that?

Set in Michigan in 1989, Hysteria! focuses on Dylan (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and Spud (Kezii Curtis), a trio of high school outcasts. Picked on by the football players and ignored by the popular kids, they’ve poured all of their energies into Dethkrunch, a heavy metal band with no profile to speak of.

Then, Happy Hollow — “Great Town, Even Better People” — is rocked by a tragedy. After the captain of the football team goes missing, his body is found ritually mutilated in a way that leads the town’s more paranoid residents to suspect one of those newfangled Satanic cults everybody on the news is talking about.

Ultra-religious Tracy (Anna Camp) sees a burgeoning scourge infecting the youth. The local chief of police (Bruce Campbell) sees a mystery. And Dylan sees an opportunity, much to the chagrin of his parents (Julie Bowen and Nolan North). If Dethkrunch can hop on the Satanic bandwagon, they could become the next Black Sabbath or Judas Priest. If nothing else, maybe it’ll get his dream girl Judith (Jessica Treska) to finally notice he exists.

It turns out, though, that there are consequences to make-believe Satanism. Soon, Happy Hollow is awash in rumors of teenage cults and demonic possession, and where there’s smoke, there may be actual hellfire.

Hysteria! is constantly craving to have everything both ways. It’s satirical yet frequently earnest, packed with supernatural elements yet aggressively mocking the human appetite to believe in the supernatural, fueled by nostalgia yet grounded in history, loaded with familiar actors yet focused on a squad of unfamiliar kids. For a while, right up through the flashback-heavy fifth installment, I wasn’t so much giving the series the benefit of the doubt as I was scratching my head and waiting for it to commit to something, just so that I could nod and say, “Oh, so that’s what this show actually is.” But the confusion is what the show actually is. While I made it to the cacophonous end, I stopped caring on any level.

The disorienting tone is set immediately by pilot director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Treating the material as half Thornton Wilder, half Dario Argento, he vacillates between a grounded period depiction of small-town life and heavily stylized camera angles and photographic filters that rather aggressively announce that all is not what it seems. It isn’t subtle, but when you have an exclamation point in the title, “subtle” probably isn’t an attribute on your checklist. So it’s fully possible that hoping for Hysteria! to become more refined and pointed, rather than simply louder and more anarchic, was a mistake of my desires and not of the narrative’s intentions — that the goal all along was for this to just devolve into ludicrousness and heavy-handed thematics as a parody of 21st century American discourse and whatnot. I can accept that, even if I didn’t enjoy it.

I did, however, enjoy aspects of the series for as long as I enjoyed any of it.

The young stars, many of whom have child acting bona fides, are very good, and some of the performances point to bright futures. Anthony is a believably confused Everyteen caught up in the season’s escalating hellacious hijinks. Curtis exhibits excellent comic timing in a role so thoroughly underwritten that I wonder if there was a 10-episode outline in which “Spud” at some point emerged as a real character. Speaking of underwritten roles, Aurelia is a real standout, finding poignant shades to Jordy’s fierce personality that feel like they came from an elaborate backstory she built for herself, rather than from anything shown onscreen. Hysteria! definitely feels like it ideally needed to be either longer or shorter.

Nikki Hahn, as a girl named Faith who’s trying to define herself by more than just her religious upbringing, shines in that aforementioned fifth chapter, both my favorite of the season and the last one I truly liked. And Treska pops in every scene as a fantasy girl whose curiosity about the occult quickly becomes a nightmare.

Among the adults, Campbell is especially notable in a piece of casting that could have exclusively rested on the easy irony of, “What if we put Bruce Campbell in a story featuring demonic possession and had him play things completely and totally straight?” It is, indeed, one of the sincerest and least arch performances of Campbell’s career, as he conveys caring and inquisitive authority with nary a raised eyebrow or sarcastic quip.

If Campbell is playing thoroughly against type, Camp is playing beyond type, or type-to-the-extreme. Directors have always spotted at least a hint of zealotry in her sunny demeanor, and she’s found a part here makes her True Blood character look understated. Her full-throated commitment is matched by Bowen, whose Linda undergoes a major transformation that makes only limited sense, but is played to the hilt. Garret Dillahunt, whom I love in almost everything, is an unsettling but underutilized presence as a shady figure known mostly as The Reverend.

You’ll guess quickly that this isn’t a series with a deep love of organized religion, but when it comes to actual messaging, it’s all a muddle. The Trump-adjacent critique of the politics of fear is yelled from the rooftops (seriously, the last two episodes are almost all shouting the same things over and over again), but in a way that’s declarative rather than smart. Despite the very specific reality of the so-called “Satanic panic” scares in the ’80s, Hysteria! only pays lip service to what was really happening in the country at that point — a Tipper Gore reference here, a slasher movie nod there. Nothing in its commentary on generational “the kids aren’t alright” anxieties or the mechanics of mass hysteria events counts as much more than recognitions that these are, yes, phenomena that recur through history.

But acknowledgments of that sort count at least somewhat as ideas, and Hysteria! has those. And you don’t get tonal chaos without big swings of tone. It’s a mess, but it isn’t without audacity. That’s a calling card, if not necessarily a success.