If the embed won’t play, MGM+’s season four teaser is also here on YouTube.
For a show about a town nobody can get out of, From has done rather well at getting out of MGM+. Amazon MGM has licensed the first three seasons to Netflix in the United States for what What’s on Netflix calls “a limited-time licensing window”, and they arrived on Monday 19th October. A week later, season one sat at No. 7 in Netflix’s global English-language TV chart, with 2.9 million views and 24.3 million hours watched, according to Netflix’s own Top 10 for 19th to 25th October. That is a worldwide ranking earned from a single country, which suggests a great many Americans spent Halloween week not sleeping.
For the uninitiated, Harold Perrineau plays Boyd Stevens, the reluctant sheriff of a small American town that swallows everyone who drives into it. The roads loop back, the woods go on for ever, and after dark the things in the forest come calling, wearing friendly human faces and asking very politely to be let in. The series was created by John Griffin, with Jeff Pinkner and Jack Bender among the executive producers. Bender directed a large slice of Lost, and it shows. From launched on Epix in February 2022, was filmed in Nova Scotia, and has become the most-watched series in the network’s history.
The obvious comparison is Lost, with a dash of The Twilight Zone, but British viewers of a certain age will recognise an older ancestor. In 1967 Patrick McGoohan woke up in the Village, a pleasant seaside resort (Portmeirion, playing itself) with excellent catering, rules that nobody would explain and no way home. From is essentially the Village with fangs, swapping Rover the bouncing balloon for something much hungrier in the treeline. Add Wayward Pines, The Truman Show and Stephen King’s Under the Dome, and you have a small but sturdy subgenre about the horror of a place that won’t let you go.
The timing is not accidental. MGM+ confirmed back in April that season five will be the last; it has been shooting in Halifax since July, is due to wrap in late November, and will premiere on MGM+ in 2027. Lending your biggest show to Netflix to drum up fresh viewers for its finale is the same trick that turned Suits into a phenomenon. It also gives the show a mild problem. Season four, which began on MGM+ in April, was billed with the promise that “the closer the residents of town get to the answers they seek, the more terrifying their search becomes”. That is the mystery-box contract in a sentence, and the mystery box has a famous habit of disappointing people when the lid finally comes off. Several million new viewers are now in the queue to find out whether From can do what Lost didn’t.
It has landed in good company. Netflix’s chart is wall-to-wall horror this week: Below, Josh Hartnett’s fisherman-versus-sea-monster limited series, held No. 1 for a third week with 7.7 million views (45.9 million in total), and the horror film Primate made No. 7 on the film list.
A word for readers this side of the Atlantic: the Netflix deal is for the US only, so don’t go hunting for it on Netflix UK. Here the show has previously aired on Sky Sci-Fi, so check your Sky or NOW listings instead. Wherever you watch it, do the sensible thing and be indoors with the talismans up before sunset. Nobody in that town ever regretted closing the curtains early.
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