Ilonka (an effectively vulnerable Iman Benson) seems to have everything when it’s all derailed by a terminal cancer diagnosis. She ends up at a seaside Hill House stand-in named Brightcliffe, an old mansion being used as a hospice center for young people. There, she finds an eccentric crew of teens who give the show its title. They gather every night in the library and tell scary stories, trying to process what’s going to happen to them through their fiction. Meanwhile, Ilonka uncovers evidence that the hospice and its mysterious manager (Heather Langenkamp of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” fame) are hiding a secret that could save her life. And so each episode alternates between Ilonka’s discoveries at the center and a story being told by one of her friends. Foundationally, the show becomes about how and why we tell stories to process the real world. And how these stories specifically say more about the person telling them than anything else.
There are eight members of The Midnight Club, and the season’s over-long, ten-episode structure allows us to get to know all of them to various degrees. Standouts include Kevin (Igby Rigney), a potential love interest who tells a multi-episode story about a serial killer that gives the show some of its most striking imagery and Anya (Ruth Codd), Ilonka’s bitter but fierce roommate. Kevin’s arc is apparently based on another Pike work titled The Wicked Heart, while another tale stems from Road to Nowhere. Taking other Pike works and embedding them in this one may be smart, but I sometimes wanted tales that felt more organically like they were coming from the lives of characters like Kevin and Anya. Kevin’s story is well-done, but one can tell it’s not quite Kevin’s story—it’s a writer/creator getting clever.
It’s also interesting to learn that most of Ilonka’s adventures at Brightcliffe are the creation of Flanagan and Fong and not from the source. It must have been daunting to consider adapting a book about kids telling stories without adding all kinds of other material, but the stuff about a former patient who may have lived and cult members in the woods is the least compelling here. This is a show about a group of patients and the construction of the Brightcliffe mysteries forces Ilonka off to her own other program too often, away from the group.