FROM

The Cruelty of Caring

I tend to distrust shows that ask for patience while promising answers somewhere down the road. The early-2000s mystery-box boom left enough scars for all of us, with series tossing out elaborate lore and hoping coherence might show up later. So when John Griffin’s *FROM* arrived in 2022 with its setup of a middle-American town that traps anyone unlucky enough to drive into it, my first response was basically a groan. I figured I was signing up for another long trudge through withheld information. But by about episode three, it became clear that the show isn’t really obsessed with explaining the town. What matters more is what living there does to the people who can’t leave.



The setup is viciously simple. By daylight, the residents try to keep some flimsy version of ordinary life intact. They sweep porches, ration food, and act as if tomorrow is still theirs. At night, the woods send something in. Griffin’s smartest and cruelest move is how those creatures are built. They do not present as monsters. They look like cheerful neighbors pulled from a 1950s Sears catalog. They don’t rush. They don’t shriek. They stroll, smiling, knock softly on windows, and ask with eerie politeness to be invited inside. The horror is not jump-scare horror. It comes from seeing basic human empathy twisted into a liability.

There’s an early scene that makes that point with brutal clarity. A little girl hears a voice outside her second-floor bedroom window. An elderly woman is there, wearing the face of a harmless grandmother, speaking gently about how lonely she is in the dark. The camera stays on that smile a touch too long, long enough for it to curdle. You can feel the pause before the mistake. What makes the moment land is not that the girl is fooled, but that the instinct being exploited is a decent one. She wants to comfort someone who seems vulnerable. Griffin turns simple kindness into a death trap.



At the center of all this is Harold Perrineau as Boyd Stevens, the town’s self-appointed sheriff. Perrineau has spent years being the sturdy supporting presence, the rattled Michael in *Lost*, the dependable Link in *The Matrix* sequels. Usually he is the one reacting to command. Here, he carries it. You can see the cost of that in the way he holds himself. Boyd starts from a rigid, military uprightness that looks ready to buckle at any second. When nobody is watching, his shoulders drop. As the seasons go on and an unexplained tremor starts betraying him, Perrineau doesn’t lean into self-pity. He plays it like an inconvenience. The town needs him functional, and he has no room to indulge his own decline. It’s a sharply observed physical performance, built on the tired knowledge that keeping people alive may only be delaying the inevitable.



Whether the show can keep this balance over four full seasons is a reasonable concern. As one Pajiba critic put it, *FROM* is "a show that perpetually threatens to collapse in on itself, expanding its universe with new twists and reveals." I can’t really dispute that. The mythology gets messy fast, and the dialogue sometimes sinks into the mud of repetitive melodrama. There are stretches where the characters make choices so maddeningly obscure that throwing the remote starts to sound sensible.

And still, I come back to it. Maybe because under all the supernatural machinery, the series feels oddly frank about contemporary life. It understands that sensation of waking up in a world that already feels broken, performing the rituals of normalcy anyway, and spending the day hoping the monsters stay outside the door.