From is a five-season supernatural horror series, sort of a spiritual sequel to Lost. First released in 2022, and ongoing to the present day, From is about a bunch of people trapped in a mysterious town where monsters come out at night – again, like Lost, but instead of being trapped on an island in 2004, they’re in Nova Scotia in the 2020s. It’s not good. That’s – sort of the first thing we have to get out of the way. With its fifth and final season currently entering production, it might be able to pull out of its nosedive, but it’s currently not very good. It has all of the same problems you’d find in classic Lost – storylines that go nowhere, confusing events that get immediately forgotten, and constant promises that an explanation is just – juuuuust – around the corner. I’m keeping a count of how many times characters tell each other ‘We have to talk, let’s go over here’ per episode, and it’s higher than you’d like it to be. It’s messy, inconsistent, underbaked, and thoughtless. The first season’s pretty good though.

So – okay. The premise of From is that there’s a magic town, and if you end up in the town, you’re trapped. If you try to go out one way, you come back in the other side. At night, a bunch of human-looking creatures come out of the woods, always smiling, only walking, and if they catch up to you, they turn into monsters and rip you apart. The first episode of season one opens with a young girl hearing a knock on her (first-floor) window: she lifts the blinds and sees an old lady standing on the porch roof. Undeterred by this obvious anomaly, the girl opens the window, and evil Grandma eviscerates everyone inside. That’s the essence of the show: people trapped in the town try to figure out how to escape while also dodging monsters and navigating interpersonal drama. There are overtly magical or supernatural themes, with magical amulets that stop the monsters breaking into a house (like vampires, they have to be let in), and a slowly unspooling mystery, where every discovery raises about forty more questions, most of which will no doubt go completely unanswered. But – okay – I’m getting caught up in the later seasons again. I’m going to focus just on season one, where the structure of each episode has a really productive symmetry. In the first episode, for example, “Long Day’s Journey into Night”, we see the arrival of our main characters, the Matthews family and Jade the tech bro. The arrival of the Matthews is paired with the exit of Frank and his family. Frank’s wife and daughter are the ones killed by evil Grandma: Frank was supposed to have nailed down the windows, so his dumb-ass kid couldn’t let the monsters in, but he was negligent, worn down by the horror of his plight. The Matthews enter the town, and Frank leaves; their innocence is paired with his resignation.

That motif of paired narratives runs through the whole first season. It’s a tidy structure, giving shape and meaning to events. In the second episode, “The Way Things Are Now”, the local deputy Kenny leads Tabitha Matthews and her daughter Julie to Colony House, an old mansion up on the hill. Both Kenny and Tabitha are separated from their familes, and the arc of the episode is their reuniting with their families under branching circumstances. Kenny’s father has dementia, and is kept in the clinic so that he doesn’t wander off in the night and get murdered by monsters. Tabitha’s husband and son are trapped in the family RV: they crashed in the woods and her son, Ethan, got a metal pole through his leg. That’s the structure of the episode: Kenny and Tabitha both go to Colony House, both experiencing separation from their families, and by the end of the episode they all come back together. That structural parallel is joined by introductions to several key aspects of the story. We learn about the talismans, which keep people safe in their homes. A talisman goes up in the RV to keep Jim and Ethan alive overnight. We also get introduced to Colony House, a bohemian hippie mansion that sits in opposition to the orderly, demure town, and the clinic, which hosts Jade’s coked-out driving buddy and Kenny’s father, while the town’s doctor, Kristi, goes to look after Ethan in the RV. Those three locations – the RV, the clinic, and Colony House – thus make up the episode’s three-part structure. There are movements back and forth along each axis: Kristi goes from the clinic to the RV to help Ethan, Jade’s coke buddy goes from the RV crash site to the clinic, and Tabitha and Kenny go to Colony House even though they want to return to their families at the RV and the clinic respectively. The jeopardy is death by monster. We’ve seen them in action in the first episode, and we’re worried it might happen again. There’s a lot of fear and good dramatic tension. The townspeople don’t know if the amulet will work in the RV. The Matthews are scared of this fantastical situation, which they’re still struggling to accept, while the townspeople are scared of the Matthews, who might do something stupid that gets somebody killed. When Tabitha and Julie arrive at Colony House, they’re held at gunpoint and tied up, so they don’t bust down the door or try to escape out a window and let the monsters in. The episode’s twist is that the danger comes from an unexpected quarter. Sara, a resident working at the clinic, hears monstrous voices that convince her to murder Jade’s coke buddy and take the amulet off the door, leaving Kenny’s father to be torn apart by monsters. In the morning, Kenny and Tabitha return to their families with two different outcomes. Tabitha’s family is restored, and Kenny’s is shattered. It’s again a tidy parallel. It’s aesthetically satisfying: the two parts contrast and reinforce, communicating to the Matthews the fragility of their situation while also setting in motion the season’s plot with Sara’s evil voices.

The rest of the first season shares this motif of parallel stories. In episode three, “Choosing Day”, the Matthews family move into Frank’s old house while Jade moves in with Kenny and Kenny’s mum. In episode four, “A Rock and a Farway”, Julie, who’s split from her family to live at Colony House, is confronted by its libertine hippie lifestyle. It’s a college-esque coming of age sequence, where Julie’s uncertainty is paired with the Matthews adjusting to this new reality. In episode eight, “Broken Windows, Open Doors”, the tension between Sheriff Boyd and his son Ellis is explored as Boyd prepares an excursion into the woods. The present-day excursion is paired with flashbacks to Boyd’s previous trip into the woods, sometime before the beginning of the show, where Ellis felt abandoned and let down. Boyd’s excursions become both the root of their estrangement and the moment of healing. In the past, Boyd went out when Ellis thought he should stay. In the present, Boyd goes into the woods again, and Ellis comes to a place of understanding and forgiveness. There’s an artful construction to these episodes. They take shape from their symmetry. Each emotional beat resonates with earlier moments, giving form and closure – even when nothing’s achieved, the episode still resolves.

The first season also delivers on the promise of spooky violence. It opens with evil Grandma, and it does not shy away from showing Frank’s wife and daughter with their organs flung all over the place. They’re eviscerated. Their ribs poke out like the cilia on a Venus flytrap. We see the horror of the monsters in the woods, and the rest of the season keeps that fear at the forefront. Six people die in the first three episodes, and after that there’s at least one death every couple episodes, plus a massive spike during the Colony House massacre, where multiple named characters get bumped off. It’s not just the dramatic body count in itself: it’s the resulting contrast between short- and long-term problems. Characters want to escape, but they also need to survive. That opposition creates dramatic tension. At the start of the show, the townsfolk are mostly hunkered down, content to ride out the night in relative safety and scrape a marginal existence during the day. The Matthews family and Jade inject new life into the town. As new arrivals, they want to escape – they believe in the idea of escape. Other characters loaf about, mocking them for their hopefulness. Survival and escape are ideological opposites, different philosophies within the town. They intersect with the differing survival philosophies of the town proper and Colony House – which are, as noted, set up as opposites, as demure small-town living and godless hedonists partying through the apocalypse. Everybody’s got their head in the sand in their own different way. The show thrives on the contrast between that survival instinct – which has immediate, brutal stakes – and the loftier goal of understanding and potentially escaping this mysterious town. That dichotomy only works as long as the threat of the monsters is present in the mind of the viewer – foregrounded, in season one, through fairly constant death and violence. In later seasons, it often feels like the monsters disappear for long stretches of time, meaning the taut opposition between survival and escape collapses into a bit of a limp nothing – a puzzle with no jeopardy, a consequence-free paddling pool where all the characters splash around and get mad at each other.

I’d have to go back over the show as a whole to confirm this, but my instinct looking back is that season one also has better interpersonal drama. From tends to frame character conflict and development in terms of secrets – for example, before they got trapped in the town, Tabitha and Jim were planning to divorce. It’s a source of tension between them, but also a secret they’re keeping from their kids. In one scene, Julie confronts her mum with a secret of her own: she knows about the planned divorce. Julie’s secret is that she knows her parents’ secret. They all talk and hash things out, but the key point is in how the show explores its characters mostly through secrets and their slow reveal. Boyd is secretly developing Alzheimer’s, Kenny has a secret crush on Kristi. Victor, a fifty-year-old man who’s been surviving in the town since he was a kid, knows way too much about what’s going on, and half of the later seasons revolve around unsuccessful attempts to get him to spit it out. These revelations deepen our understanding of the characters. They’re not really plot developments, most of the time – they don’t often advance the plot in any meaningful way – but they tell you more about the people in the town. Personal secrets are mysteries to be unpacked, much like the mysteries of the town itself. Part of the strength of the first season, then, is that all the secrets are fresh. Later seasons run low. You don’t get the type of season one scene where Father Khatri or Donna talk about their experiences arriving in the town – you know everything about the old characters, and any new arrivals are a limited resource.

Partly the quality of the first season of From is just by virtue of being a first season. It’s fresh and new, it has the least baggage and the longest road ahead – so it can sort of do whatever and leave the later seasons to figure out what was going on. There’s novelty to the premise of a spooky town, where the mystery of why they’re trapped is paired with the secrets of unfurling characters. But the whole thing is also underpinned by good writing – by strong, structural episodes with clear motifs and parallels, and enough moment to moment violence to infuse the whole thing with dramatic stakes. Discovery feels important and necessary, paired with survival, safety, freedom. It’s actually pretty good TV.