TV Review: Lockwood & Co Season One (2023)

Lockwood & Co Season One (2023) adapted for television by Joe Cornish from the novels by Jonathan Stroud

Lockwood and Company is a small business that incapacitates ghosts in a world where haunts are a regular nighttime occurrence. The situation is so bad, there's a nightly curfew. That's because a ghost's touch can kill or send one into a catatonic state. If that wasn't bad enough, adults can't see the ghosts, only children and teenagers. At a certain age, the young lose their ability to see or hear ghost. Which means all the ghost hunter (of which there are many companies) are young. When they detect a ghost, they can find whatever relic (usually some personal item of the deceased) is keeping the spirit attached to this world.  Destroying the relic or covering it in iron (like a sheet of chain mail) will keep the ghost detained.

Anthony Lockwood (Cameron Chapman) runs his own company even though he is young (late teens, maybe twenty?). His partner is George Karim (Ali Hadji-Heshmati), though George mostly does the research because he is brilliant at it. They hire Lucy Carlyle (Ruby Stokes), who has just left a company in northern England after a bad case that left her partners dead or catatonic. The real problem was the company's adult supervisor who did nothing to support the team. But the supervisor put the blame on Lucy, so she skipped town, hoping to find better fortunes in the city. Lockwood's company has no adult supervision and ekes out a living with smaller jobs. Lucy wants to lay low but Lockwood wants big jobs to establish his reputation. And pay off his debts.

The story has an interesting and well-imagined setting. The "rules" are clear and set up plenty of drama. The show has a couple of on-going story lines, all of which are intriguing. The action is fun. The actors do a solid job. Joe Cornish, the show runner, has had experience with younger actors in fantastic settings (he wrote and directed Attack the Block). He does another fine job here. I have not read the books on which the show is based but I am interested to try them.

Recommended.

Currently (February 2023) this is only available streaming on Netflix.