It’s hard to say whether the tumultuous production is to blame, but something went very wrong as seemingly talented people made Peacock’s “Crystal Lake,” a disastrous reboot in almost every way. The director of the wildly influential original film, Sean S. Cunningham, had been talking about bringing the franchise to TV for over 20 years, but it really came back to life in 2022 when A24 and the incredible Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”) announced production on a new series.
The excitement in the horror world was palpable. Jason Voorhees, through the lens of the man who redefined Hannibal Lecter, with one of the craziest things ever to appear on network TV? It couldn’t get here fast enough. And then the strike brought production crashing down in 2023. When it ended, Fuller and even the once-also-involved Kevin Williamson (“Scream”) were gone. Did their departure make this a disaster, or did they leave because it had already become one?
Brad Caleb Kane, a writer on “Tokyo Vice” and “IT: Welcome to Derry,” took over his first Creator credit, and the plot of “Crystal Lake” jumped to the early ‘70s, announcing that Jason wouldn’t even be the lead: That would be Pamela Voorhees, the true villain of the first film. How Pamela went crazy enough after the death of her son to murder a bunch of camp counselors sounds like a promising set-up, but to say that “Crystal Lake” is barely that show would be an understatement. It’s never long enough, jumping around in tone and character motivation so wildly that it resembles that old writing class or theater game where one person keeps the story going after someone else starts it.
As a season, it’s one of the most muddled and inconsistent outings in a long time, constantly hampered by a lack of direction and motivation until a final sequence of episodes turns it into something else entirely, yet again. Characters disappear, subplots shift meaning, and it all eventually rewrites the canon of Jason’s origin story in a way that’s about as ridiculous as “Jason X.”
It starts with familiar, promising beats. Linda Cardellini, so good on “DTF St. Louis” that she just won an Emmy, plays Pamela Voorhees, a cook at Camp Crystal Lake in the early ‘70s. She’s protective of her deformed son Jason (Callum Vinson), who is mocked and bullied by the other kids at camp. In one of the show’s early interesting choices, Jason dies in the first episode, left to drown by counselors who weren’t doing their job. But instead of leaning into the guilt that would turn Pamela into a movie icon, Kane and company start getting weird before the end of the first episode, when a couple of tough guys from out of town show up looking for Pam.
It turns out that Pam and Jason were on the run from someone, hiding out in Crystal Lake, and if I gave you a hundred guesses, I don’t think you’d guess how this subplot entirely reshapes the legacy of Jason and Pamela in a way that’s truly antithetical to the entire allure of the “Friday the 13th” series. We don’t need conspiracies; we need an unkillable monster in the woods.
“Crystal Lake” also makes the mistake of trying to be more than just a prequel or homage to the first film, perhaps thinking that a show in this series can’t lose sight of Jason himself. Without spoiling, the show picks up again a year after Jason’s drowning, but they never found the boy’s body, and there are signs that he may still be alive. And maybe bigger? And homicidal? Again, the new origin story tries to explain some of this, but it just makes for a show that often feels downright incoherent through its midsection, unsure of who its heroes and villains should be.
For example, no one sat down and decided who Pamela truly is in this version of this universe. Without spoiling, she becomes the Pam from the first movie for a bit, but then the show almost forgets her. She also becomes the mother of a potentially new troubled child, but the show discards that too for an ending that clearly feels like the product of rewrites, though it does include a fun, villainous performance from Hamish Linklater. The “Widow’s Bay” nominee is one of the few performance spotlights.
Cardellini gets lost in a constantly rewritten character while poor William Catlett (so good in “Color Book”) gets the thankless role as town sheriff, a love interest for Pamela but more of a plot device to move things from one death to the next. Shows like “Widow’s Bay” and “Below” have reminded us of the need to fill out programs like this with interesting ensembles, but the creators of “Crystal Lake” fundamentally fail to do so, spending so much time with counselors and even a group of local hippies/victims that have about as much personality as the hapless souls in “Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.”
If you’re coming to “Crystal Lake” for the bloody stuff, this camp kitchen serves up a bunch of it. The showrunners clearly prioritized practical effects in what horror nuts used to call “Quality Kills,” and they give viewers a bit of it almost every episode. Faces are sliced off, body parts are shed, and the red stuff flows. At least “Crystal Lake” comes to life a bit during its intense-violence scenes, even if many of them lack any emotional heft or permanence.
One could easily argue that no death in the “Friday the 13th” legacy has ever had true emotional heft or permanence, and that “Crystal Lake”’s disposability is a feature, not a bug, but the show needed to be more escapist fun to pull that off. It’s not funny or inventive enough to be a true slasher, partly because a season of hour-long episodes demands something deeper than a 90-minute gorefest. All that being said, “Crystal Lake” finally gets someplace tonally consistent in its final run; even if it gets there thanks to some silly plotting (and aesthetic/directorial choices in the penultimate episode that literally had me shaking my head, but I won’t spoil here), the finale does produce some captivating showdowns.
That said, I was struck by how little the six episodes between the premiere and the finale actually mattered. You could literally watch the first and last episodes and miss little of the story. Again, perhaps the creators of “Crystal Lake” thought they needed to intentionally keep Jason Voorhees in the B-movie muck, but then they needed to lean into the POV murders and unforgettable soundtrack instead of even pretending to profile grief, culture clashes, and government conspiracies. The result is a show that’s never serious enough and never fun enough. Jason Voorhees deserved better.
Whole season screened for review. It premieres on October 15, 2026.
