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Created by Jay and Mark Duplass (Animals, Togetherness), Room 104 is a new HBO half-hour anthology series that takes a peek inside one room at an average American corporate motel, exploring the stories of the characters who pass through it on any given night. Embracing the idea that "the banal" can be a most interesting place if you stop and take a look, each of the season's 12 episodes tells a different story, as the room stays the same everything else – the tone, the plot, the characters, even the time period – changes. Tapping into a variety of genres including comedy, drama, thriller and horror, the stories and characters featured in Season One include: the tale of a pizza-delivery boy who gets way more than he bargained for; a babysitting gig gone eerily awry; a love story between two octogenarians; a woman seeking to enter another realm of reality with the help of a cult-like priest; two Mormon missionaries thrust into a crisis of faith; and more. Poignant, quirky, and filled with plenty of twists and surprises, each episode of Room 104 plays like a mini-movie, offering a new discovery from one week to the next, telling tales of everyday people striving for connection and meaning inside a single room. (HBO Max)
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It takes a while for the viewer to guess where the unconventional anthology approximately wants to go (and the variable quality of individual contributions and their diverse moods doesn't help too much), but with a little patience, one can still tune into the unpredictable disposition. However, the problem lies in the (lack of) quality of most episodes not written by Mark Duplass. While his scripts usually lead to some emotional catharsis, other authors often come up with an idea that could hardly stretch to five minutes, let alone half an hour, especially since deducing what the screenwriter meant by it is sometimes quite exhausting and even annoying in the case of simple episode twists. The best/most original moments are wasted relatively early, and there are increasingly fewer of them over time, while the number of pieces with negative potential to easily kill the entire product increases. From the third season onwards, I struggle more than ever, and the frequency of incomprehensible experiments that only aim to fulfill the promised "pushing creative boundaries" is too high.
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Photo © Home Box Office (HBO)
