Given the numerous flips and tumbles it executes during its ten-episode routine, it’s unsurprising that Dispatches from Elsewhere doesn’t stick every landing. But as a whole it’s a delightfully engaging series, well worth the journey for its narrative chutzpah and sheer invention. For those overwhelmed by the bounty of the Peak TV from which it emerged, I would add that its superpower is unpredictability, so best to stop reading this if you’re one who prefers limited preconceptions — then come on back to compare notes, if you like.
Improbably based on a documentary film, Dispatches from Elsewhere opens from the viewpoint of Peter (Jason Segel), a data drone for a music streaming service in Philadelphia vacantly going through life’s motions. Peter is jolted from his rut when he spots a series of peculiar flyers on his way home from work. Intrigued, he takes a tearaway tag, calls a phone number, and finds himself sucked into a mystery. Is it all just peculiar performance art, or is it real? Following the clues, Peter encounters an upbeat trans woman named Simone (Eve Lindley), who is convinced it is all a clever, scavenger-hunt-like game. Later, the pair meet up with a spry, playful older woman named Janice (Sally Field) and an entirely too serious conspiracy theorist named Fredwynn (Andre Benjamin). The four of them become a team in the game/mystery, which involves a creative, free-spirited collective known as the Elsewhere Society, their nefarious, controlling nemesis the Jejune Institute, and the search for a missing artist named Clara.
Created by Jason Segel and narrated by the erudite Richard E. Grant (who portrays Jejune Institute founder Octavio Coleman, Esq.), Dispatches from Elsewhere is confident, different, and confident in its difference. Given the real-world source material, its compelling initial mystique threatens to wear off from time to time; the quartet’s speculation about the true nature of their shared experience ultimately has only one plausible result. Fortunately, the show has plenty of narrative tricks up its sleeve to subvert the inherent expectations, cleverly using the inspiring events as a creative springboard. The real-world origins of the story thus spawn a “secret history” level underneath, which the fictional characters — a winning found family — entertainingly negotiate. Adding to the surprise is a meta streak, resorting in amusing fourth-wall breaks and eyeball-kicky flights of fancy that help the show further straddle the line between truth and story. The result is both audacious and charming, with humor, darkness, melancholy, and heart, landing somewhere between Lodge 49 and The Twilight Zone in its whimsically wistful tone. And the final episode is truly surprising, a massive storytelling swing. That ending only partially connected, for me, and for some it may even confound or infuriate…but it is nothing if not artistically ambitious. Dispatches from Elsewhere is several scuff marks shy of a masterwork, but there’s nothing quite like it, and for that it deserves sincere kudos — and far more eyes on it.
