"Archive 81: Season 1" - STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

There's so much content out there these days that it can be hard to find anything worth watching. I know that sounds backwards, but there are simply so many options that the true gems are hidden among the ranks of the mediocre, or even the outright bad. Besides, modern shows are designed with carefully planted cliffhangers so that once you get started, it's hard to walk away. Then you look up, and six hours have passed, and you realise that you didn't really enjoy any of it. It was distracting, and it got its hooks in you, but you kinda wish that you had those six hours back.

This isn't a full review. Think of it as early impressions. I am scouting ahead and reporting back to you, but I'm not that far ahead. If the show is promising, I might circle back and give it a full review later. Or I might just cross one title off of that never-ending list of content.

Archive 81: Season 1

We're discussing the Netflix show here. We're not talking about the podcast that the show is based upon. Yes, Netflix--a primarily visual medium--is trying to adapt a podcast--an entirely audio-based medium. It's a bold choice, to say the least.

Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) restores footage for a museum, and he's good at it too. When his boss gives him a rushed assignment to restore an innocuous tape, he does such a good job that he's offered a big-money assignment working for a mysterious organisation called LMG. There's just a catch: LMG needs him to work out of an isolated facility in the Catskill mountains. They also seem to know a bit too much about Dan, including aspects of his past that he thought were safely hidden.

Why do they want this particular archive of films recovered so badly? What will happen to Dan now that he's isolated out in the mountains? You'll have to watch the show to find out for yourself. But did I mention that the Catskill facility has no internet? And that the cell service is spotty?

Archive 81 is a horror show about secrets and mysteries. Considering that it was based on a podcast, the show is shockingly well-shot. The footage of the Catskill mountains is beautiful and atmospheric. The facility itself looks creepy, but not to the point that it looks unrealistic. Everything about the show feels lived-in, and the slow build of suspense and horror grows from this feeling that the world of Archive 81 is plausible.

That said, it's worth emphasising that this is slow build horror. The very first sequence of the show involves found footage, and it's generally pretty creepy, but after that the first episode follows Dan as he decides to take LMG's job offer, and he works on recovering some of their footage. Some of the footage is unsettling. More than that, it's mysterious. This is the sort of horror where you spot people in the background and it makes you shiver. So far, not a lot of blood or decapitation.

Slow doesn't mean boring, though. There's just a deliberateness on display in the choices that Archive 81 is making, and there are promises of things to come. What will Dan find on the tapes in the archive? In the first tape he recovers for the project, someone advises another character to "stay away from the 6th floor." What's that about?

Enough aspects of Dan's job are unsettling, and since this is a horror show, we know that we're going to be going to dark places eventually. When the sound design skews creepy, or when that spotty cell-service cuts Dan off from the outside world, we know that this is just the herald of things to come.

A lot of this hinges on Mamoudou Athie's performance as Dan. This is a show where the protagonist spends a good portion of the first episode watching TV with a thoughtful expression. That should be boring, but Mamoudou Athie steps on stage with an immediate charisma. His reactions aren't exaggerated, but there's just something incredibly compelling about how he plays his part.

Personally, I'm hooked.

The Verdict:

Stream it!

Within the first half hour, the show had my attention. For the next half hour, I couldn't look away. By the time the cliff-hanger landed at the end, my fate was sealed. There are 8 hour-long episodes in the show, and I really doubt that I'll be able to walk away from Archive 81 before the season hits its conclusion.

"Archive 81: Season 1" is available via Netflix.