Dispatches from Elsewhere review: Quirky TV show based on real-life game

For three years, thousands of people participated in a real-life citywide game, now the basis of a new TV series from Jason Segel.

It helps to have some context first for new TV series Dispatches from Elsewhere.

Created by Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), the 10-part miniseries is an odd proposition that risks losing the audience within 30 minutes with its repetitive talk about the “divine nonchalance” and “vision quests”.

So, context is important.

For three years between 2008 and 2011, thousands of people over San Francisco took part in an “alternate reality game” spearheaded by artist Jeff Hull. It was essentially a real-life scavenger hunt/citywide escape room/art experiment.

Prompted by strange flyers found around the city, participants were inducted into The Jejeune Institute and were sent on various missions which included locating a supposed missing girl.

Threaded through the missions was a cult-like philosophy around “divine nonchalance”, a vaguely defined quality that the TV show would describe as a “perpetual quietness of the heart”.

The core four

What the game did do is bring together groups of strangers and get them to make human connections and appreciate the city they live in. And unlike a real cult, no one drank any Kool-Aid at the end.

The movement was even the subject of a 2013 documentary feature called The Institute.

OK, that’s the context.

Featuring a great cast, Dispatches from Elsewhere is based on the documentary, but now it’s a fictionalised narrative of a group of people who are drawn into this elaborate game, this time in Philadelphia.

We’re introduced to Peter first, albeit in a rushed and meta voiceover from Richard E. Grant’s Octavio Coleman, who tells us the truncated intro is to save everyone 20 minutes.

Peter, we’re told, is only “existing and not living”, sleepwalking through his banal life without risk, joy or incident. When he responds to a flyer for human force shield testing, he ends up in a nondescript office building in an orientation from the Jejeune Institute.

RELATED: Everything new to streaming in May

RELATED: Netlix’s Damien Chazelle series will be divisive

Making a connection

That’s when a conflicting opposite – the Elsewhere Society – urges him to flee.

He ends up meeting Simone (Eve Lindley), a young transgender woman who’s also playing the game. Eventually, the two team up with Janice (Sally Field) and Fredwynn (Andre Benjamin) among the hundreds of people who gather after a night dancing in the rain with Big Foot.

All four of them are in search of something more – Peter for meaning, Simone for acceptance and Janice for identity.

Dispatches from Elsewhere should be one of those shows that hook into you straight away but for all of its ambitions around connecting people together, it can actually be distancing.

Perhaps it’s all the culty pontificating about false prophets or agents of nonchalance, or the at-times over-sentimentalism, but Dispatches from Elsewhere isn’t quite as emotionally honest as it thinks it is.

Dispatches from Elsewhere has a great cast

Looking for things to pass the time? The best shows to watch, the funniest videos, the best hacks? Find it all at our Life (goes on) in Lockdown section

It settles in better after the deliberately strange first episode which feels derivative of Charlie Kauffman while borrowing the whimsy of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the mystery of The Twilight Zone.

Part of the problem with the intro is Peter is such a blank slate character, perhaps that’s deliberate and designed to wake us out of our own malaise, but it means he doesn’t have a specificity, which makes it difficult to invest in his arc.

When the perspective switches to Simone and then to the other characters, the series feels more lived in and graspable.

Once it reveals itself more, and allows the other characters to take centre stage, it feels more rooted in its own identity.

In another, earlier era, Dispatches from Elsewhere would be an amiable, even intriguing, series but when there’s so many shows clamouring for attention, it’s neither here nor there.

Dispatches from Elsewhere is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video

Share your TV and movies obsessions | @wenleima