Jason Segel’s been quiet lately, having made just a few appearances in films over the last few years with the likes of The Discovery, Come Sunday, and The Friend. It’s been even longer since he was a featured in a television series, after How I Met Your Mother came to an end in 2014. But the actor-writer-director returns to TV with the 10-episode anthology series Dispatches from Elsewhere, which sees Segel doing what he does best: working as part of a larger ensemble, which, this time includes Sally Field, André Benjamin, Richard E. Grant, and Eve Lindley. At first glance, it’s an unlikely collection of actors, though that unlikeliness plays into the show’s sense of whimsy and an increasingly fantastical story that verges on the surreal.
Dispatches from Elsewhere is part of the growing trend of anthologies popping up on television. It’s a smart move in that it assuages audience concerns over becoming invested in yet another potentially long-term series that will either join the overwhelming glut of content already out there or be canceled, just when people are starting to dig it. The notion of this being an anthology also work in the show’s favor because it makes it easier for the series to tap into and make use of stranger, more bizarre sensibilities that might otherwise be a tough sell on a story that’s going to run for four seasons or more.
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Part of what makes the show work is the degree to which it, and its characters —at least some of them — are aware that they’re a part of a television show. Dispatches pretty much comes right out and says it through a direct address by Grant’s seemingly nefarious Octavio Coleman, who discusses the anthological format and attempts to do away with the common TV show pilot episode trope of spending the first 30 minutes or so explaining who the main character is and what he wants. This approach effectively sets the tone for what’s to come: a (despite what Octavio had to say about pilot episodes) lengthy introduction to Segel’s Peter, a lonely office drone who is a slave to his workaday routine and is generally afraid to live life to the fullest — whatever that means. As luck would have it, Peter soon finds himself involved in a strange and fascinating game, one that introduces him to Lindley’s Simone, a carefree spirit who, unlike Peter, isn’t made afraid by the game, but rather is invigorated by its potential.
That potential is unclear at the beginning, but it is very intriguing. Segel, who wrote and directed the first episode, builds a world that feels akin to something like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil —though less weird on the surface — and, weirdly, The Matrix, with its collection of characters convinced there’s something more to the world if they just look deep enough. Much of the first hour is spent with Peter and, eventually, Simone, who pretends to be invested in the game for the sake of playing the game but, like the others — Fields’s impossibly nice Janice and Benjamin’s paranoid genius Fredwynn — is secretly hoping to find that thing that’s missing from her life.
The series teeters on the verge of navel-gazing, but its desire to be weird, and make that weirdness fun, instead of unintelligible, keeps Dispatches from being overly self-indulgent. Segel and the rest of the cast — Grant, in particular — are all engaging in their various roles, making the lack of congruence between the characters part of the show’s fuzzy charm. Field and Benjamin enter into the equation late in the first episode, but it’s not long before it’s clear they both have a far more substantial part to play in unraveling the mystery at the show’s core.
That mystery is engaging enough to keep audiences coming back week after week. Dispatches’ execution of the familiar notion of there being more to reality than the world is capable of comprehending is wisely positioned as a game, one where those playing — Segel, Benjamin, etc. — will come out the other side better for having done so. That potential outcome is a welcome change of pace from the usual nefarious, conspiratorial plots being cooked up by elite few. While there is still a hint of that at play here, it’s so over the top as to be almost harmless.
The result, then, is a charmingly weird show that capitalizes on its many twists by finding new and exciting ways to engage the audience in an unexpected mystery.
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Dispatches From Elsewhere premieres Sunday, March 1 @10pm on AMC.
