Billy Crystal’s plodding, preposterous Before is everything wrong with TV right now

Before
★½
Apple TV+, episodes 1 and 2 available now, new episodes every Friday

Here’s an early warning sign about Before, Billy Crystal’s first proper TV turn since his breakout years on Soap in the late 1970s and early ’80s: the Apple TV+ series is a dark psychological thriller where Crystal plays a recently widowed child psychologist in the depths of interminable grief.

Hmm. So you’re telling me you’ve got one of the most beloved comedic stars in screen history, Harry Burns himself from When Harry Met Sally..., and you’re going to use him for misery porn? This show wants us to hate it before we even begin.

Billy Crystal and Jacobi Jupe get spooky in Before.Credit: Apple TV+

To be fair, at 76, Crystal has spent much of the past decade riffing on his comedic legend to mixed results – in 2015’s short-lived mockumentary The Comedians, where he tried to Larry David-ise his persona opposite Josh Gad; in 2019’s Standing Up, Falling Down, where he played an ageing comedian opposite Ben Schwartz; and in 2021’s Here Today, where he played an ageing screenwriter opposite Tiffany Haddish.

Crystal, who also serves as an executive producer on Before, clearly saw an opportunity to play against type in this series. Every comic legend deserves a chance to branch out, the same way Crystal’s buddy Robin Williams famously went dark, often. But Before is no One Hour Photo. It’s barely a blank Polaroid.

The series follows Eli (Crystal), who’s doing his best to ignore the grief caused by his wife Lynn’s (Judith Light) suicide – until a creepy blond kid arrives at his front door, his bloodied fingernails etching weird hieroglyphics into the wooden frame.

Rather than run or call for an exorcism, Eli – successful child psychologist that he is – takes on the creepy kid, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), as an assignment, quickly uncovering unexpected links between their respective traumas. The phrase “mass psychogenic illness” gets a lot of play, along with some esoteric nonsense about past lives, which you would’ve already gleaned from the show’s title because what else is the “before” going to stand for?

Judith Light plays the ghost of Billy Crystal’s late wife in Before.Credit: Apple TV+

Before was created and largely written by Sarah Thorp, who wrote and produced the Omen sequel series Damien, which (perhaps tellingly) ran for one season before being axed. In Before, she leaves no horror cliche untouched. Noah sees monsters no one else can, he’ll suddenly speak in archaic tongues, he’s constantly scribbling visions from his nightmares, such as piles of human bones, in heavy black crayon (someone get him a full box of Crayola already!).

For genre lovers, it’s all fun for a while, as we anticipate the playful subversion of such stock-standard horror tropes. Unfortunately, the subversion never comes. This is horror as dumb as it gets – relentlessly explanatory, gory sequences (many filmed by Aussie director Jet Wilkinson with ’90s alt-rock music video flair) undone by “it’s just a dream!” head fakes, meandering plot turns.

Even with writing so weak, Crystal can’t help but bring some playful charm to the dourness, and the odd world-weary wisecrack. But the A-list supporting cast – including Rosie Perez, Robert Townsend and Hope Davis – is wasted on characters with barely a backstory, much less any interior life. In unfortunate timing, the boy playing Noah ages distractingly between episodes three and four, a result of the show’s filming having been paused due to last year’s Hollywood strikes. I can suspend disbelief like anyone, but this is the sort of ramshackle production we’re dealing with.

Not to be dramatic, but Before is everything that’s wrong with TV right now. The promise of TV’s golden age was scope and span: storylines that could unfurl like chapters in a novel, fostering deeper emotional connections with more characters. In today’s streaming wars, where feeding the content pipeline is the goal, you’re more likely to get obnoxious propositions like Before: a 10-episode limited series that really should have just been an 88-minute movie. There’s more padding here than in my doona.

By the end, if you heroically get there, you’re 300 minutes closer to death with just a bonkers shot of Billy Crystal projectile vomiting to recall from it all. Like Eli, you’ll just be wanting to return to before.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.