‘The Changeling’ Episode 1 Recap: Once Upon a Time in New York

LaKeith Stanfield in a weird dark-fantasy horror fable: The Changeling kind of sells itself, right? Putting aside all the other impressive entries on the actor’s filmography, two of his most iconic roles are in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Donald Glover’s Atlanta, two projects which helped define this whole lane in contemporary film and television. Throw in ace directorial stylist Melina Matsoukas behind the camera and a basis in the acclaimed novel of the same name by multi-award-winning author Victor LaValle, and creator/writer Kelly Marcel’s got one of the autumn’s most anticipated shows right out the gate. The big question is whether the hype in your head matches what you see on screen.

Bouncing around in time from as far back as a trans-Atlantic voyage in 1825 (its connection to the main narrative as-yet unexplained) to the relative present day of New York City in 2010, The Changeling’s first episode chronicles the formation of two couples. In the late ‘60s and ’70s, (white) parole officer Brian West (Jared Abrahamson) patiently, or is that maddeningly, woos (Black) receptionist Lillian Kagway (Adina Porter), finally securing a first-date screening of Rocky after nine years of trying. They fall in love and have a baby named Apollo after the character from the film, but by the time the boy is four, Brian has disappeared. (The initial wording is a bit unclear but it seems as though he left, rather than simply vanishing.)

Two or three decades later, Apollo (Stanfield), a bookish and stylish sort, takes a similarly quixotic-at-first run at Emma Valentine (Clark Backo), an attractive and compassionate librarian at his local. They hit it off fast once she finally acquiesces to a date, but their relationship is put on hold when she moves to Brazil for a time. 

Which is where she encounters a witch with mismatched David Bowie eyes who ties a string around Emma’s wrist on the banks of a lagoon. If she wears the string until it falls off naturally, the witch says, her three wishes will come true…but under no circumstances is she to cut the string off.

Apollo thinks it’s a cute story, but clearly believes he himself is cuter. “I am the god Apollo,” he proclaims with his usual catch phrase, cutting the bracelet off and promising to grant her three wishes himself. 

Apollo and Emma get married. They get pregnant. They go out to dinner at a too-fancy restaurant, where Emma’s type-A friend Michelle (Rasheda Crockett) confides in Apollo that he’s made two of Emma’s wishes, a good husband and a healthy child, come true already. 

But before he can hear the third wish, Emma goes into labor. Rushing back to their place for a home birth via the subway — complete with loud, ill-timed Showtime performers, in the episode’s funniest “only in New York” bit — they’re forced to deliver the baby, a boy, in the subway car due to a power outage. 

If all of these seems normal, other than the witch thing, we have indications that it isn’t. Emma’s parents died under circumstances she won’t discuss. Apollo’s uncle was murdered by soldiers in front of his mother and aunt back before they emigrated. Apollo has recurring nightmares about a black-masked being who shows up at his door and reveals himself to be Apollo’s long-lost father before blowing billows of black smoke out of his mouth; subsequent iterations of the dream reveal it to be a kidnapping, likely one that actually happened and which Apollo’s wounded mind has transmuted into illusion. The episode ends with brief glimpses of various characters being imprisoned and tortured. And yeah, there’s the whole witch thing.

My fear regarding the show at this point — and by “fear” I mean “uh oh, I’m not sure about this” rather than “oh my god, this is scary as hell” — is this: Speaking personally, I just derive little enjoyment from, and have little use for, Modern Fairy Tales, or stories about The Power of Family. They’re just not terribly reflective of the actual human condition as I’ve observed it over the course of my life. 

I get that the show is knowingly using clichés when it opens with “Once upon a time” (during a literal dark and stormy night no less) and closes with “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage.” But these phrases do speak to the show’s overall focus, however subverted they may be. So I worry.

Even if the show hasn’t yet gone far in either direction — it’s difficult to make a big point about The Power of Family when your scariest image is of an estranged father kidnapping his son — it does lean awfully hard on another kind of storytelling: meet-cutes, first dates, a library courtship straight out of The Music Man, a magical rooftop wedding, a quirky “we’re having a baby” announcement straight out of an Alexa commercial, a rapturously scored sex scene, a “the baby’s coming now” scene…romance, in other words. Big Hollywood romance. 

I’m not here for this either. It’s not that I don’t like romance as a genre…okay, so it is like that. But I could be convinced, I’m pretty sure, and if anyone could do the convincing it’s likely a pair of actors as charming and photogenic as LaKeith Stanfield and Clark Backo. 

The real problem is that I don’t see how you get from all that mushy stuff to a place capable of actual horror. It’s not just the nature of that narrative that’s an issue here, it’s all the techniques used to depict it, like the overactive score by Dan Deacon. I found myself pining for moments of silence in which I could decide for myself how to feel about the sweet or scary things on screen. As it stands, you can certainly deliver the occasional terrifying jolt — the faceless-father dream sequence is proof of that — but you’re not going to be able to build up the atmosphere of unbearable mounting dread that great horror generates if you’re constantly working at cross-purposes with it by telling everyone about twoo wuv. There’s a time and a place for that, and that time and place isn’t Spooky Season. 

That said, there’s not much to complain about from an execution perspective. The first appearance of the masked man made me holler loud enough to startle my wife. The wittily vulgar postcard from legendary black magician Aleister Crowley that Apollo discovers in one of his old books did the same. Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs” shows up on the soundtrack; from Us to Them to Atlanta it’s kind of a staple of Black horror and horror-adjacent filmmaking in recent years, but I can’t imagine anyone complaining once they’ve listened to it. Shrewdly, there’s a pervasive and unnerving drumbeat of racism pulsing beneath virtually every interaction Apollo has with white people, from his father on down, and it frequently manifests itself as an obstacle between him and his pursuit of his beloved books, which is a way of concretizing a huge issue by marrying it to a smaller one. The guy just wants to read old books, for christ’s sake. Can we just let him live? Well, this is a horror story after all, and I suspect that question will grow more pointed with each passing episode.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.