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Lockwood.jpg

Netflix's 'Lockwood & Co.' Is Spot-On Spooky YA TV

By Alison Lanier | TV | February 2, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | February 2, 2023 |


Lockwood.jpg

I admit that I haven’t read Jonathon Stroud since he made me cry as a teenager with the ending of Ptolemy’s Gate, but based on my binge of The Bartimaeus Sequence, I’m going to guess these newer books are as spooky, engaging, and well-done as the ones I grew up with. That’s all to say I haven’t read the Lockwood and Co. books, so I can only weigh the show on its own merits. But I have a healthy admiration for the very prolific Stroud, and for his books’ translation to screen: With an apparently higher-end production value and tremendous casting, Netflix achieves pitch-perfect spooky YA.

The world of the show Lockwood & Co. is one where half a century ago “The Problem” occurred: a whole taxonomy of ghosts and specters began to appear, whose touch alone is lethal to the living. Children 13 and older are trained to hunt these ghosts as a sundown curfew grips the world as a matter of course, and memorial obelisks are erected in town squares in memory of the children who died battling the ghost incursion.

Lockwood & Co. takes the occult detective genre and fits it neatly into the YA frame. We have the plucky female lead, Lucy Carlyle (Ruby Stokes) whose exceptional talents as a spiritually sensitive child are exploited by her mean-spirited mother and then by an irresponsible adult trainer whose incompetence gets all her classmates killed (or “ghost-locked”) and blames the whole thing neatly on 16-year-old Lucy. Lucy makes a break for London, where she can’t get a job at any ghost-hunting agency except for the rag-tag, teen-run Lockwood & Co., composed of two teenaged boys: posh Anthony Lockwood (Cameron Chapman) and goofy, socially awkward George (Ali Hadji-Heshmati).

These three outliers are foils to London’s corporatized ghost-hunting industry, orchestrated out of massive, very modern official buildings and guided by strict legal procedures designed to sanitize the risking of/loss of young lives. I can’t overstate how well-cast our three leads are; they fit so comfortably into their roles that the story gets to really shine.

The lovable band of unlikely misfits-turned-best-friends sticks the landing and plows on into a story of cover-ups, conspiracy, and secrets in every direction. How did “The Problem” really begin? How did the body of this up-and-coming starlet end up behind this wall? Inspector Barnes (Ivanno Jeremiah) monitors the tiny child-run startup with a disapproving gaze and rival ghost-hunter Quill Kipps (Jack Bandeira) plays the asshole nemesis with great aplomb.

While the stakes are nearly always life-and-death, there are also the tremendously endearing YA tropes of found family and inevitable but awkward flirting. The show does a fabulous job of establishing the little rag-tag team of heroes as playfully and at times stupidly teenaged, but with the solid pathos underneath that makes that dynamic work for the story.

Well-cast and solidly executed, Lockwood & Co. achieves what it set out to be: a binge-worthy YA adventure that, unless it’s made blasphemous Witcher-like departures from its source materials, should delight fans of the books. It’s a fun adventure with a very teen-ish sense of humor, carried by three pitch-perfect leads and the requisite teenaged drama. If that’s your cup of tea, I can promise you a very bingeable journey.