Small Prophets: Mackenzie Crook’s ‘idiosyncratic’ comedy is a ‘treasure’

Mackenzie Crook’s new comedy is “eccentric, funny, sweet, and sad – often all at once”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. If you enjoyed “Detectorists”, his “gentle” comedy series about metal-detecting enthusiasts, you will find “much to love” in his latest show.

Our “hero” is Michael (Pearce Quigley). He leads a “lonely existence” since his partner, Clea, vanished seven years ago. His days are filled working at the local DIY superstore and visiting his father Brian (Michael Palin), who is in the early stages of dementia and lives in a care home nearby. But the show takes an “unexpected swerve into magical realism” when Michael sets out, by “dabbling in alchemy”, to grow six homunculi in his garden shed. His quest to conjure these “titular ‘small prophets’” is “driven by the one question to which he desperately seeks an answer: where is Clea?”

This plot twist may “come as a surprise to those who have spent the first 25 minutes expecting a downbeat workplace comedy about drills and buckets”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. But it’s “all part of the show’s charm”. Crook has once again crafted an “idiosyncratic British comedy” and it’s “undoubtedly a treasure”.

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“Don’t be put off” when “Crook pulls the rug” and the show shifts from “kitchen-sink comedy into folklore and the supernatural”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent. If you stay the course, you will be “rewarded with something funny, strange and surprisingly accessible”.

Crook appears in a supporting role as Michael’s “officious supervisor, Gordon, with his dreadful ponytail, clipboard and obsession with work break time”, said Ben Dowell in The Times. “But even here nothing is quite as it seems.”

The show is a “pure, pure pleasure”, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. This is Crook, so of course there is “wonder below the surface”. In another’s hands, the story would “dissolve into facile whimsy”, but he makes “exactly the right decision in every moment, big and small”. Quigley, who played a supporting character in “Detectorists”, shines in the “lead role he deserves”, and Lauren Patel is “sensational” as Michael’s young colleague, Kacey. At a time when it feels like the world is “fast running out”of “wonderful things”, “Small Prophets” is a reminder “that British telly can still create impossible marvels”.