Mackenzie Crook, who wrote and directed “Detectorists,” a gorgeous pastoral comedy about hobbyist hunters seeking Saxon gold in southwest England, has a new series, “Small Prophets,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV. Set mainly around a suburban cul-de-sac, a retirement home and a “DIY store” (think Home Depot), it’s a different sort of series and yet very much expressive of Crook’s sensibility and interests — friendship, love, memory and the more mysterious world that informs the ordinary one. It’s meditative, melancholy, sweet and funny. And also involves a sort of treasure hunt and some digging in the ground.
Pearce Quigley, who played Danebury Metal Detecting Club member Russell in “Detectorists” stars as Michael Sleep, whose life has been on pause since his girlfriend, Clea, disappeared on Christmas Eve seven years earlier. For five of those, he’s been working at the Tool Box, amusing himself by idly messing with customers. Standing before a 20-foot wall of bright blue buckets, he tells one, facing the wrong way, that they don’t carry buckets, that they’re old-fashioned and no one uses them anymore. He confuses another by asking, “Why would we sell six screws in a biodegradable paper bag when if we only sell them in polyurethane tubs of 500, the customer is forced to buying much more of them? Making us much more money.” But he will also build a birdhouse, on site, for a woman who wants one.
In the break room, he begins a friendship with equally bored but sociable co-worker Kasey (Lauren Patel) after she asks him whether his beard itches. This will form the spine of the story, and in a way its point.
Over the objections of officious ineffectual manager Gordon (Crook, sporting the world’s saddest ponytail), he regularly leaves work to answer a call from the retirement home where his father, Brian (Michael Palin, lovely), makes Rube Goldberg contraptions, enters random magazine contests and forgets things. Michael, who, on the off chance Clea walks back in, continues to inhabit the house she owned, over the objections of her brother, Roy (Paul Kaye), who is broke and wants to sell it.
Michael (Pearce Quigley) develops a friendship with his equally bored co-worker Kasey (Lauren Patel).
(Apple)
It’s packed with boxes, except for a locked room, which Michael had decorated, based on an old photograph, in the image of her favorite childhood Christmas — a surprise never delivered. The front and back gardens are overgrown, bringing a little wild countryside to the otherwise lifeless cul-de-sac, to the displeasure of neighbor Clive (Jon Pointing), a Gladys Kravitz type, though not to Clive’s wife, Bev (Sophie Willan), who finds Michael interesting.
Hoping to help Michael deal with his unanswered questions, Brian tells him about an Italian man he met in Egypt while doing national service, a student of “metaphysics and alchemical lore,” who knew how to produce homunculi, “tiny prophets who lived in great glass jars full of water.” They could answer any question about the past, present or future and were incapable of lying. Brian had written down the recipe, and, in his back shed, Michael, with the eventual assistance of Kasey, sets about following it into strange and disturbing territory.
Crook’s world is slightly askew while remaining emotionally true. Quigley, bearded and burly but soft-edged with a deliberative way of speaking that can serve a range of emotions, is brilliant, and Patel balances him admirably. But every character here feels original and individual, even a pair of seeming villains introduced halfway through. (There is a good deal of snooping and skulking.) Any moment that threatens to turn to cliché, turns another way.
The series is decorated with odd little touches and ideas, not necessarily explained. Kasey, who is not an actor, dreams of appearing on “Neighbours,” a canceled Australian soap opera. A teenage boy (Adam Wright) bicycles endlessly around the cul-de-sac. A cafe is called Pickles, “after the dog that found the World Cup,” an actual historical event from 1966 that seems like just the sort of thing Crook might dream up. (“I don’t know what the connection is,” says Michael about the dog. “I don’t think he was from around here.”) Kasey watches a program called “Celebrity Barrel Scrapers” (“Barrel Scrapers,” but with celebrities) in which contestants “scrape the barrels out, get ‘em clean.” There are seagull puppets, a tandem bicycle, an oil stain in the shape of a rabbit, a meteorite.
Michael will get to ask some questions, and get his answers. But the series still ends, happily, with the title “To be continued.”
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