Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Big Door Prize’ Season 2 On Apple TV+, Where The People Of Deerfield Look To The MORPHO Machine To Figure Out What’s Next In Their Lives

We appreciated how the first season of the Apple TV+ series The Big Door Prize didn’t just give us yet another tale of a person’s midlife crisis, but different perspectives from an entire town who turn their lives upside down because a mysterious machine tells them to. Now that the show’s small-town, found-family vibes are well established, will it really need that mysterious machine to keep telling its stories?

THE BIG DOOR PRIZE SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from a random bar. A bartender with blue spots on her back reads a book, then puts on a cover-up when a customer comes in.

The Gist: That bartender is Hana (Ally Maki), who worked at a bar in the middle of nowhere before she came to Deerfield. The customer is Kolton Kovac (Sammy Fourlas), trying to buy a beer with the driver’s license of his father Beau (Aaron Roman Weiner). They have some banter, and she gives him an ale of the ginger variety. When he goes to the bathroom, we see the bar has a MORPHO machine.

After he leaves, Hana finds more blue spots on her back, and more and more envelopes from MORPHO cards in the trash. She decides to go to Deerfield, where Kolton is from, not knowing that he died in a car accident. She goes to Mr. Johnson’s (Patrick Kerr) store and confuses Jacob (Fourlas) for his now-dead twin brother. As we now know, she was there when the group surrounded the MORPHO machine as it asked if everyone was ready for “the next stage.”

Of course, everyone looks to Hana for answers, since the machine was at her old bar. That’s when she talks about the blue spots. Almost everyone has them somewhere. What Hana can’t answer is what the “next stage” means.

Dusty (Chris O’Dowd) and Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) go home to discuss the idea of having a trial separation in order to find themselves. Their daughter Trina (Djouliet Amara) continues her relationship with Jacob, despite his insecurities that he’s not nearly as much fun as Kolton, her previous boyfriend, was. Giorgio (Josh Segarra) and Nat (Mary Holland) find that their attraction to each other is real. Izzy (Crystal Fox) named Beau the sheriff. And Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) continues to wonder if a life in service of God is for him anymore.

In the meantime, Hana and Jacob figure out that the theremin that’s next to the MORPHO machine is the key to unlocking it again, at the same time Dusty and Cass do. As the married couple run to the store, Hana and Jacob unclock the machine, which now asks for the cards it generated for people. Dusty is the first to give it a try, and what he sees surprises him.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’ll say the same thing about The Big Door Prize, adapted from M.O. Walsh’s novel by David West Read (Schitt’s Creek), that we said before its first season: It feels like Big mixed with a small-town comedy like Welcome To Flatch.

Our Take: The first season of The Big Door Prize established how the story is really more about the people in Deerfield turn their lives upside down because some mysterious machine tells them to. It seems that in the second season, MORPHO is still an important factor, as it now is showing everyone computer-graphic animations of the “next stage” of their lives, which are more metaphors for what these people are looking for than anything else.

We almost wish at this point that the machine fades into the background. Sure, it’s mysterious, and we still have no idea where it came from; now we also have the mystery of the blue dots to contend with. Even Kolton had blue dots on him, despite the fact that MORPHO hadn’t even made its way to Deerfield yet. But the core Deerfield group is so well-entrenched at this point, and are so convinced that they need to make the changes dictated by MORPHO, that the machine no longer serves as the impetus to change.

Take Dusty and Cass, for instance. Before they even see their “next stage” animations in the second episode, they’re already well down the road to their trial separation. Sure, it seems like the friendliest, most loving separation we’ve ever seen, but it’s a separation that makes sense, given the fact that the two of them got together when they were young and never really explored life apart. So, even if they have a solid marriage, which they do, they need to address the gnawing sense of “what if”; that might have happened with or without MORPHO.

The rest of the stories really can go on without the machine’s assistance, like Reuben’s questioning and his burgeoning relationship with Hana. We also like seeing Jacob and Trina together; Trina at first treats her parents’ trial separation with the usual teen snark, but then realizes that it’s actually happening and it tears her up a bit. And Giorgio and Nat are simply there to be completely over the top.

Are we ever going to find out the mystery behind the MORPHO? The longer this show goes, the less likely we think we’re going to get any answers. So we’d rather just spend time with the people in Deerfield as they all reconfigure their lives instead of having the show bogged down by a mystery that will never be solved.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: We see Dusty’s reactions to the “next stage” that MORPHO shows him.

Sleeper Star: The more we see Djouliet Amara as Trina, the more we see her as the unsung hero of the story, given how she’s both a skeptical teen but still devoted to her parents and the idea of how solid their marriage is.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Cass says she has dots on the bottom of her foot, Dusty is surprised. When Trina says, “Don’t you see each other naked?” Dusty shoots back at his daughter, “We see each other’s fronts naked, all the time.” Why be so defensive with your daughter, Dusty?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Big Door Prize works because it allows us to spend time with a group of appealing characters that have become a “found family” as they try to figure out just what they want to get out of their lives. That vibe continues in Season 2.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.