Light Shop

Don't be fooled by the absurdly effusive marketing department style on line reviews, for the most part "Light Shop" is a horribly disjointed, disorientating, often frustrating and generally tedious watch. Like so many scripts these days, over trying to be "clever" is a substitute for actually telling a cohesive, relatable story. In spite of its title "Light Shop" spends a large portion of its time, fumbling around in the creative darkness, trying to find a glimmer of direction and purpose, let alone interest. The only real upside I could see in this lethargic mess, was decent acting and solid production values. Even then one painful episode that went nowhere I cared to follow, was more than enough. In summary, the only thing this series illuminates is the script's inability to tell an intelligible, engaging and generally worthwhile story. A hard pass from me.

Light Shop tells a compelling and beautiful story over its, in my opinion, too short season. The tales, for we do experience a series of individual stories that weave together but are each their own story, highlight the terrifying experiences we can all experience in the dark, and the warm comfort that awaits us in a warm bright space. These stories are told non-consecutively and non-linearly, jumping from one to the next, but that is a clear effort on the part of the creators to emphasize the scary, disjointed world the characters are experiencing. Any viewer familiar with the concept of a non-linear story will have no trouble keeping track of the story. The fact that every bulb on display in the well lit titular location is a warm white incandescent that makes the space feel welcoming and homey rather the cold white of a florescent or the harsh true white of an LED is an obvious yet well places bit of set design. The sharp contrast with the other well lit location in the show which does fill one of those descriptions reminds us immediately that not all light is comforting, just as not all dark is to be feared.