Billy Crystal's “Before” is ponderous, absurd, and shows everything that's wrong with television right now

Before
★½
Apple TV+, episodes 1 and 2 available now, new episodes every Friday

Here's an early warning sign BeforeBilly Crystal's first real TV appearance since his breakthrough Soap Set in the late 1970s and early 80s: The Apple TV+ series is a dark psychological thriller in which Crystal plays a recently widowed child psychologist deep in endless grief.

Hmmm. So you're telling me that you have one of the most popular comedy stars in film history: Harry Burns himself When Harry Met Sally…., and you're going to use him for misery porn? This show wants us to hate it before we even start.

To be fair, Crystal, at 76, has spent much of the last decade exploring his comedic legend, with mixed results, in the short-lived 2015 mockumentary The comedianswhere he tried to portray himself as Larry David to Josh Gad; in 2019 Getting up, falling downwhere he played an aging comedian opposite Ben Schwartz; and in 2021 Here todaywhere he played an aging screenwriter opposite Tiffany Haddish.

Crystal, who also serves as an executive producer BeforeHe clearly saw an opportunity to play against type in this series. Every comic book legend deserves a chance to thrive, just as Crystal's sidekick Robin Williams famously often went into obscurity. But Before is no One hour photo. It's hardly a blank Polaroid.

The series follows Eli (Crystal) as he does his best to ignore the grief over his wife Lynn's (Judith Light) suicide – until a creepy blonde boy arrives at his front door and scratches strange hieroglyphics into the wooden frame with his bloody fingernails.

Instead of fleeing or demanding an exorcism, Eli – a successful child psychologist – takes on the scary boy Noah (Jacobi Jupe) as an assignment and quickly uncovers unexpected connections between their respective traumas. The phrase “mass psychogenic illness” is used a lot, along with some esoteric nonsense about past lives, which you already figured out from the title of the show, because what else does “before” stand for?

Before was created and largely written by Sarah Thorp, who also wrote and produced the screenplay omen Sequel series Damienwhich (perhaps tellingly) ran for one season before being axed. In BeforeShe leaves no horror cliché untouched. Noah sees monsters that no one else can see, he will suddenly speak in archaic languages, he constantly scribbles visions from his nightmares, such as mountains of human bones, with heavy black crayon (someone already got him a full box of Crayola!).