I truly hope my appreciation of Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us, and HBO's Lovecraft Country, played not even a slither of a role in the greenlighting of Them. The only thing that impressed me in this film was the performance we received from Melody Hurd, who played the youngest daughter, Gracie. I cannot wait to see more from this talented young actress! Unfortunately, the rest of the series was less than impressive.
It feels like the goal here was to cram as much Black trauma and pain as possible into 10 episodes, and to attempt to look like a creative or new way of displaying the lived horrors of Black people in this country they threw in some not so scary jump scares, not so interesting ghosts and ghost stories (definitely a lot of Poltergeist vibes), and a sprinkle of completely random adjacent storylines. Worst yet, those parts weren't even done well or in a clever way. I found myself yelling, "But why?" and "I don't need to see this." I don't know what they were trying to give here, but whatever it was I never got it. I feel like the horrific actions against the Black characters weren't that shocking, because in some way or another I've already known that these things have happened to Black people, and my disdain for how they were displaying what I was seeing made me feel emotionless even whenever the Black characters seemingly got some forms of retribution; because this felt like a poor attempt at disguising Black trauma porn.
Now I'm sure there will probably be some think pieces coming out breaking every little thing down and celebrating this series, but I'm not even interested in reading them. If I can't appreciate it at face value without a think piece I stand by my position that this was not needed in the first place. We are in the midst of a trial where a horrific murder of a Black man was captured on video and many around the world have seen it. So I honestly don't need a whole series that seems to have the only intention of bombarded me with visuals of the horror I am already so aware of in the name of what exactly I have no idea.