Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen

I started looking forward to this miniseries back in August 2024, long before the ill-fated final season of Stranger Things, because I thought the Duffers were geniuses worth keeping an eye on — but it turned out to be the opposite. I’ll get to that later.

Let me walk you through the PROS and CONS of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen:

The cast is good and the acting is solid overall, BUT some characters were overacting in places, which was a bit cringeworthy. It was nice to see Victoria Pedretti again, and Camila Morrone looks a lot like Dua Lipa — and in some scenes her facial expressions are reminiscent of Millie Bobby Brown, which is quite interesting.

The concept is cool, BUT the execution is weak and poorly thought out in places.

The visuals — costumes, makeup, set design, etc. — are beautiful, BUT the color grading is terrible: everything is so dark you can barely see anything, which gets genuinely annoying after a while.

There are some really cool and interesting ideas for certain scenes, BUT they’re completely undermined by the cheapest possible tricks.

The first few episodes try to build atmosphere and dread, but by episode 4 the plot has already revealed itself, and from that point on the only scares are jumpscares — which is a lazy and cheap approach.

In those early episodes, the creators also try way too hard and way too obviously to convince the audience that something is wrong with the guy’s family — so heavy-handedly that I immediately figured they were just an ordinary family who wouldn’t actually do anything to the main character. And that’s exactly what happened.

Some characters make decisions so dumb and illogical that they only exist to set up something weird later in the plot — again, cheap.

On top of that, I had a persistent feeling that Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen was desperately trying to be Longlegs or something like it, but falling far short — and it’s unclear why they even went in that direction.

The series was disappointing: cheaply made and chaotic. I don’t know how much involvement the Duffer brothers had in the concept, writing, or production, but it felt like their fingerprints were on it — and that might be exactly why the series fell flat.

I did relate to the main character, since she’s anxious and tends to overthink everything, and the humor lands in places — but that’s about it.