Why Dark is Better Than Castle Rock

Castle Rock. Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution

Now that Dark, the Netflix masterpiece about time travel and alternate dimensions, has wrapped I thought it might be useful to compare that show to another very similar series, Hulu’s Castle Rock. They are both alike in terms of tone and content, but Dark is the vastly - by leaps and bounds - superior show. In fact, Castle Rock is pretty bad when you get right down to it. So a quick look at the two shows will help illustrate what Dark does so well, and where Castle Rock dropped the ball.

Castle Rock has all the outward trappings of a great show. It is loosely based on the works of Stephen King, drawing characters and ideas and settings from his writing and then giving them life in separate anthology seasons. So, for instance, season one is set in Shawshank State Penitentiary and it deals with typical King stuff like cross-dimensional evil beings and so forth. It also has a great cast. Season one stars Andre Holland in the lead role, supported by a really deep stable of terrific actors like Bill Skarsgård and Sissy Spacek.

The mystery at the heart of the first season is a reasonably compelling one: the warden at Shawshank commits suicide, which leads to the revelation that he had been keeping a young man in a cage in an unused wing of the prison. The young man may be the Devil, and appears to create chaos wherever he goes. His story dovetails mysteriously with that of Henry Mathew Deaver (Holland) who mysteriously disappeared when he was a kid, reappearing 11 days later. Of course, this being drawn from the ideas of Stephen King, Deaver’s childhood neighbor has the Shining, and the whole thing ends up revolving around a trans-dimensional rift.

This is all very similar to Dark, which tells the story of a German town with a cursed inter-dimensional and temporal rift under a nuclear power plant that creates all sorts of mind-bending mysteries for the protagonists to grapple with. So why does Dark leave Castle Rock in the dust? The first reason is one of style. Dark is impeccably shot and structured. From the soundtrack to the shot composition it cultivates just the right vibe to perfectly mesh with its cosmic themes and impenetrable narrative structure. Castle Rock, on the other hand, is more straightforward in how the mystery unfolds.

There’s not a lot of structural innovation. And that would be perfectly fine, except the way the show is shot is flat as hell. I believe the directors were trying to cultivate a sense of dread and terror, to give us the sense of a world slightly off-kilter. But they are very bad at it. Very bad indeed. The way Castle Rock is constructed and filmed is almost cinematic malpractice. It is slow to the point of tedium, indulging in long and useless shots of people walking up streets, down streets, up halls, down halls. When Deaver goes to the prison for the first time to meet the The Kid, the show wants to imbue the moment with gravitas. They want the viewer to feel the full weight of this moment.

The way they go about conveying this is to shoot several really long takes of Andre Holland driving to the prison, getting out of the car, then walking down a sidewalk, then walking through a hallway. It’s probably about 30 or 40 seconds of straight B-roll of the actor just walking. You’ve got these great actors and a pretty good idea, and you are going to waste time doing that? I am myself a fan of long takes and establishing shots - up to a point and when they serve a purpose. But Castle Rock is not very judicious with them, from a visual and pacing point of view. It feels like padding, rather than a way to communicate the atmospheric dread they were obviously going for. This might be a case of trying to stretch an idea too far - Castle Rock probably would have made a really great episode of Black Mirror. As a 10-episode series, it doesn’t have the legs.

The writing is also lazy and often just plain bad. It’s almost a crime to waste a cast of this caliber with such dreck. My favorite example is a scene where Deaver calls his source in the prison to deliver some bad news. We see Deaver in bed make the call, and say into the phone: “I’ve got some bad news….” Then the scene cuts away. OK, a little slow but we get the point and now we know he has called this guy and told him the court hearing has been cancelled. We don’t need any more info on this point.

But then a few scenes later, we see the guy get the message and listen to the thing in its entirety on his phone. It’s just duplicating the previous scene, except this time longer and with nothing to show for it. There would have been a million better, more efficient and more clever ways to accomplish this narrative task. The entire series is hamstrung by this kind of weak, lazy writing.

It’s also stuffed full of awkwardly placed social commentary. There’s nothing wrong with the message, but the delivery is inexcusably bad with lines such as “Do you think I would be working at this prison if there was a Wall-Mart within 60 miles!” being commonplace throughout the show. The cartoonish villainy of the prison officials is particularly ham-fisted. This is meant to critique the privatization of prison services in America, a fine subject to talk about if it were handled with just a modicum of subtlety and depth beyond slack-jawed caricatures shouting “Prison Want Money!”

All of these elements are done much better in Dark. Better writing, better structure, faster pacing, more stylish, better atmosphere, better soundtrack, less (like a lot less, like none) B-roll of characters simply walking from Point A to Point B slow as hell. This is proof that two shows can be about similar topics, have big budgets and strong casts. And yet nailing down the details like competent writing, blocking, directing and pacing are the difference between a masterpiece like Dark and a waste of time like Castle Rock.