【The Playbirds】

Netflix’s newest fantasy teen drama series,The Playbirds Locke & Key,is the product of more than 10 years of negotiations, failed pilots, and shuffling among networks — but the industry's indecisiveness is undetectable throughout the series’ marvelously constructed first season.

It's been a long and winding road to get there. Locke & Keyis closely based on the intricate horror comic book series of the same name, which began in 2008, written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodríguez. Following the comic’s early success, Fox acquired the rights for a TV adaptation and released a pilot in 2011 that starred "Beautiful Soul" singer Jesse McCartneyas Tyler Locke, one of the series' main characters. The show wasn't picked up. Joe Hill spoke with Colliderabout a potential film trilogy in the works in 2014; that didn't pan out either. In the years following, Hulu worked on a pilot of the show that never aired. Netflix then developed the idea into the 2020 iteration of the series.

Locke & Key is fascinating, clever, and ever-unfolding.

The Netflix series focuses on the youngest generation of the Locke family, one of the many sets of intergenerational protagonists featured in the comic series. The series picks up with Nina Locke (Darby Stanchfield) relocating her children — Tyler (Connor Jessup), Kinsey (Emilia Jones), who are both in high school, and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott), a pre-teen — from Seattle to her late husband Rendell’s (Bill Heck) ancestral home in Massachusetts (“Keyhouse”) for a fresh start. Rendell has been murdered by Sam Lesser (Thomas Mitchell Barnet), a classmate of Tyler’s in pursuit of a set of keys he was convinced Rendell had.

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It’s easy to see why so many different production companies have taken a crack at adapting the comic books: Locke & Key — both its original storyline and its Netflix adaptation — is fascinating, clever, and ever-unfolding.

So much unfolds, in fact, that Locke & Key’s complexity might have hindered networks from getting it right in the past. Once the Lockes move into Keyhouse, they realize that the connection Sam forged between Rendell and the keys was spot on. The family experiences a series of supernatural events thanks to their new abode: Bode encounters a demon trapped at the bottom of a well on Keyhouse’s property, and the siblings acquire keys that grant them the powers of teleportation and invisibility (among others), and access to explore their own psyches.

The aforementioned demon, played by Laysla de Oliveira Credit: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

Tyley, Kinsey, and Bode then use their newfound powers to understand why Sam Lesser was after their father and what Rendell had to do with the keys. Nina also embarks on her own investigations of her late husband's adolescence in Keyhouse.

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The entire fantastical awakening is underscored by Tyler and Kinsey’s experiences assimilating into a new school where all the students are familiar with their family’s legacy, which includes a group of Rendell's friends mysteriously drowning off the Massachusetts coast when they were in high school, and the siblings' grief-filled investigation into Rendell’s past. Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode learn that their late father frequently used Keyhouse's magic keys when he was young. The episodes get better over time, and Locke & Key proves to be well-written, entertaining, and spooky.

Also fun: Adults are unable to remember their prior use of magic in the show's universe. Therefore, even though Rendell used to have access to the magical dimension contained in the Keyhouse, he lost and forgot powers, meaning his kids needed to discover the keys for themselves. In addition, their mother Nina interacts with the Keyhouse's powers, but immediately forgets about her experiences. Watching Locke & Key's teens hold all the unadultered (pun absolutely intended) power is great.

The series is self-aware: teen drama clichés, such as a love triangle engineered by Kinsey among two of her male friends, are simultaneously acknowledged and indulged in. Showrunners Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill balance the mystical and emotional elements inherent to Locke & Key’s storyline quite well.

What’s more, the series features multiple strong performances: Jessup, Jones, and Scott are more-than-convincing siblings. In particular, Jessup and Jones have fantastic familial chemistry, and act as Bode’s guardians and partners in crime who rise above teen sibling tension to fight demons and manipulate Keyhouse’s magic for good. Plus, as a Scandal fan, I was excited to see that Stanchfield’s portrayal of Nina wasn’t reminiscent of Pope & Associates’s Abby Whelan.

Jones, Jessup, and Scott as the Locke siblings Credit: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

Locke & Key features a diverse cast whose demographics are not focused on throughout the series’ first season. While Netflix’s other recent additions to its slate of teen and kids programming — such as Spinning Out, Raising Dion, andDaybreak— have centered narratives around the varying formative experiences of teens of color, Locke & Key is noticeably mum on such themes.

In the series’ universe, non-white characters simply exist, without comment or storyline about racial profiling or tokenization. In fact, it seems Locke & Key utilized color-blind casting at large and didn't cast characters as they appeared in the comic books… except when it came to its leads, the Locke family. Given that Locke & Key's storylines don’t center around race, it seems showrunners missed an opportunity to cast the series' leads as non-white as well.

Locke & Key is now available to stream on Netflix.

Topics Netflix