Unlike the rest of Mike Flanagan's work on Netflix, "Midnight Club" feels like a series they are going to try and continue (inscrutable algorithm allowing), so I'm going to put my review here for now and shift it to the main page if the show isn't continued. Also, unlike the rest of Flanagan's work, I didn't much care for this one.
In the early 90's, teenage Ilonka (Iman Benson) is diagnosed with a terminal cancer. Researching miracle cures leads her to the case of Julia Jayne, who was supposedly cured of the condition at Brightcliffe Hospice. At the Hospice, Ilonka means several other teenagers with various terminal conditions and she is inducted into their "midnight club". They meet in the dead of night and tell each other scary stories, but also have a pact that when one of them passes, they will try their best to get a message back from whatever is to come.
I've a few issues with this series, rather than any one major one. Most of them revolve around the tone and the pacing. I'm not quite sure who the series is aimed at. The teenage cast, family melodrama and the "Are you afraid of the dark"-esque format suggest that it's for a mid-to-late teen audience, but from a swearing and occasional violence point of view it probably skews a little older. Much more damaging to my enjoyment was the decision to focus more on the stories that the Midnight Club tell each other, rather than on the main narrative of what is happening/happened at Brightcliffe. I understand, though I've never previously heard of him, that these Christopher Pike stories have their fans, so I'm sure that some people were happy to see them on screen - but for me, they were usually relatively tortured metaphors for what the teller was experiencing, which had they been five minutes of each episode, I'd have been OK with, but they were much longer than that. I felt they were keeping me away from the bit of the show I was interested in.
Nice to see some of the Flanniverse (as Netflix insist on calling it) alumni in various roles. The young cast were all reasonably good, with any I didn't like feeling like my problems were with the characters, rather than the actors.
I mean, I'm in the bag enough that I'd watch more if and when it's forthcoming - but for me, this was the least scary and least interesting thing that Flanagan has been involved with. Hoping for a lot more from "The Fall of the House of Usher".