Bruce Campbell in Peacock's Satanic Panic comedy

If you're a cautious first-time TV creator given vague agency, you have two choices (for the purposes of this exercise).

First, you can make your vision as easily digestible as possible, to make a series that is clearly marketable and satisfactorily resolved, in the hopes of engineering a success and getting more shows made in the future.

Or two, you can throw every idea into your brain in the vicinity of the screen, knowing that success is never guaranteed and you may never get another chance.

Of course, the result of the second course of action could be complete and utter chaos that audiences won't know how to process and networks won't know how to sell. However, at least you will have the satisfaction of knowing you left nothing on the table.

The Peacock one Hysteria! it's hard to explain. It's a seemingly impossible series for Peacock to market – no trailers or advertisements I've seen effectively capture any aspect of the plot or tone – and, at eight episodes overall, often unsatisfying to watch. Yet in its chaos there is an admirable refusal to compromise or an inept inability to consolidate. I actually think you can suspect the latter and still give creator Matthew Scott Kane credit for the former, because there is a version of this project with the rough edges all sanded down that could tie it all together in a neat bow and probably find an audience broader. But where would the ambition be in this?

Set in Michigan in 1989, Hysteria! focuses on Dylan (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and Spud (Kezii Curtis), a trio of high school outcasts. Chosen by the football players and ignored by the popular kids, they poured all their energy into Dethkrunch, a heavy metal band with no profile to speak of.

Then, Happy Hollow – “Great Town, Even Better People” – is rocked by tragedy. After the football team captain goes missing, his body is found ritually mutilated in a way that leads the town's most paranoid residents to suspect one of those new satanic cults everyone's talking about on the news.

The ultra-religious Tracy (Anna Camp) sees a growing plague infecting young people. The local police chief (Bruce Campbell) sees a mystery. And Dylan sees an opportunity, much to the chagrin of his parents (Julie Bowen and Nolan North). If Dethkrunch can get on the satanic bandwagon, they could become the next Black Sabbath or Judas Priest. If nothing else, maybe it will make the girl of his dreams, Judith (Jessica Treska), finally realize he exists.

It turns out, however, that there are consequences for faux Satanism. Soon, Happy Hollow will be awash with rumors of teen cults and demonic possession, and where there's smoke, there could be actual hellfire.

Hysteria! he constantly wants to have it both ways. It's satirical but often serious, rich in supernatural elements but aggressively mocking the human appetite to believe in the supernatural, fueled by nostalgia but anchored in history, loaded with familiar actors but focused on a team of unfamiliar kids. For a while, during the flashback-heavy fifth episode, I wasn't so much giving the series the benefit of the doubt as scratching my head and waiting for it to commit to something, just so I could nod and say, “Oh, so this is what which is actually this show.” But the confusion is what the show actually is. As I reached the cacophonous end, I stopped caring on any level.

The disorienting tone is immediately set by pilot director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Treating the material as half Thornton Wilder and half Dario Argento, it oscillates between a period depiction of small-town life and highly stylized camera angles and photographic filters that rather aggressively announce that all is not what it seems. It's not subtle, but when you have an exclamation point in your title, “subtle” is probably not an attribute on your checklist. So it is quite possible than to hope Hysteria! becoming more refined and sharp, rather than simply louder and more anarchic, was a mistake of my desires and not of the intentions of the narrative – that the goal all along was for this to simply devolve into ridiculous and heavy-handed themes like a parody of 21st century American discourse and whatnot. I can accept it, even if I didn't like it.

However, I enjoyed some aspects of the series for as long as I enjoyed it.

The young stars, many of whom have bona fide acting children, are very good, and some performances point to bright futures. Anthony is a believably confused Everyteen caught up in the season's escalating hellish hijinks. Curtis displays excellent comedic timing in a role so carefully underwritten that I wonder if there was a 10-episode pattern in which “Spud” at some point emerged as a real character. Speaking of underwritten roles, Aurelia is a true standout, finding touching nuances in Jordy's fierce personality that seem to come from an elaborate backstory she's constructed for herself, rather than anything shown on screen. Hysteria! it definitely seems like it should ideally be longer or shorter.

Nikki Hahn, as a girl named Faith who is trying to define herself by more than just her religious upbringing, shines in that aforementioned fifth chapter, both my favorite of the season and the last one I really enjoyed . And Treska appears in every scene as a fantasy girl whose curiosity about the occult quickly becomes a nightmare.

Among the adults, Campbell is particularly notable in a casting that could have relied solely on the easy irony of “What if we put Bruce Campbell in a story with demonic possession and had him play things completely and totally straight?” It is, in fact, one of the most sincere and least arcane performances of Campbell's career, as he conveys thoughtful, inquisitive authority without a raised eyebrow or sarcastic quip.

If Campbell is playing completely against type, Camp is playing beyond type, or from type to the extreme. Directors have always noticed at least a hint of fanaticism in her sunny demeanor, and she's found a part here that makes her True Blood the character seems discreet. Her all-out effort is matched by Bowen, whose Linda undergoes a major transformation that makes only limited sense, but is played to the hilt. Garret Dillahunt, who I love in almost everything, is a disturbing but underused presence as a shady figure known primarily as The Reverend.

You'll quickly guess that this isn't a series with a deep love for organized religion, but when it comes to the actual messages, it's all a mess. Trump's critique of the politics of fear is shouted from the rooftops (seriously, the last two episodes pretty much shout the same things over and over), but in a declarative rather than intelligent way. Despite the very specific reality of the so-called “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, Hysteria! it only pays lip service to what was actually happening in the country at the time: a Tipper Gore reference here, a slasher film there. Nothing in his commentary on generational anxieties such as “the kids are not well” or the mechanisms of mass hysteria events matters more than the recognition that these are, yes, repeating phenomena in history.

But acknowledgments of this kind count at least somewhat as ideas, e.g Hysteria! has those. And you don't get tonal chaos without big swings in tone. It's a disaster, but not without audacity. This is a calling card, if not necessarily a success.