Billy Crystal’s Before is raucous, absurd and highlights everything wrong with TV right now

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

Here’s an early warning sign about BeforeBilly Crystal’s first proper TV outing since his breakout year Soap 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 in the depths of endless grief.

Hmm. So you tell me you have one of the most beloved comic stars in screen history, Harry Burns himself When Harry met Sally..., and you want 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 past decade riffing on his comedic legend to mixed results—in 2015’s short-lived mockumentary The comedianswhere he tried to Larry David-ize his persona to Josh Gad; in the 2019s Stand up, fall downwhere he played an aging comedian opposite Ben Schwartz; and in the 2021s Here todaywhere he played an aging screenwriter opposite Tiffany Haddish.

Crystal, who also serves as executive producer on Beforeso clearly an opportunity to play against type in this series. Every comic book legend deserves a chance to branch out, the same way Crystal’s pal Robin Williams often went dark. But Before is no One hour photo. It’s barely a blank Polaroid.

The series follows Eli (Crystal) as he does his best to ignore the grief caused by his wife Lynn’s (Judith Light) suicide – until a creepy blonde boy arrives at his front door, his bloody fingernails etching strange hieroglyphs into the wooden frame.

Instead of running or calling for an exorcism, Eli – a successful child psychologist that he is – takes on the creepy kid, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), as a task, quickly uncovering unexpected connections between their respective traumas. The term “mass psychogenic illness” is played a lot along with some esoteric nonsense about past lives that you would have already picked up from the show’s title, because what else does “before” stand for?

Before was created and largely written by Sarah Thorp, who wrote and produced Omen sequel series Damienwho (perhaps tellingly) ran for one season before being cut. IN Beforeshe leaves no horror cliché untouched. Noah sees monsters no one else can, he suddenly speaks in archaic tongues, he constantly writes visions from his nightmares, such as piles of human bones, in heavy black crayon (someone give him a full box of Crayola already!).