The Big Door Prize ★★★½
Apple TV+, from March 31

An unassuming but rewarding comedy about our private expectations and hopes, Apple TV’s latest series is Frank Capra gone science-fiction: It’s a Wonderful Life with a mind-boggling device as the galvanising force. A machine branded as Morpho appears without explanation in the local store of a nondescript American town, where $2 and few minutes inside gets you a printed card that claims to reveal “your life potential”. “Storyteller” reads one result, “Undertaker” is another. Soon townsfolk are flocking.

One contrarian is Dusty Hubbard (Chris O’Dowd), first met at a contented 40th birthday breakfast with his wife, Cass (Gabrielle Dennis), and their teenage daughter, Trina (Djouliet Amara). “I think I have everything I wanted,” demurs Dusty, a high school history teacher trained to consider the past, when Morpho is subsequently pressed on him. “Maybe you didn’t want enough,” an advocate replies. Like the shop in Stephen King’s Needful Things, the certainty Morpho provides is too much for some.

Creator David West Read, who adapted M. O. Walsh’s 2020 novel of the same name, is a graduate of Schitt’s Creek, but the humour here is cumulative and gently insightful while the setting, the town of Deerfield, is so American anodyne as to be fable-like. The impact of Morpho only widens the cheery dissonance as people quit their jobs or embrace dangerous new hobbies, while a couple happily divorces to pursue their individual potential late in life.

The plot mechanics – obvious question: who the heck made this machine? – are touched on, but they never overwhelm the cross-section of characters. You don’t know if other locales also have a Morpho, but in Deerfield it seeps into every part of people’s lives. Dusty and Cass struggle to reconcile their very different cards, while the local priest, Father Reuben (Damon Gupton) has a crisis of faith. The humour expertly flickers between the wry and bittersweet, as Dusty’s European History class turns into a forum for debating Morpho.

“Liar” reads an abandoned card Dusty finds, and the concept sends each half-hour episode into a new orbit as the struggle of Dusty and Cass is matched by a focus on a different resident. O’Dowd, who has come a long way from The IT Crowd, is a terrific emotional weathervane, with Dusty buffeted as his own certainties disappear. The Big Door Prize is the flipside to Apple TV+’s 2022 hit Severance: both trade in life-altering technology, but here idiosyncratic warmth wins out over dystopian tension. The show’s potential is fulfilled.

Wellmania ★★½
Netflix

Overly reliant on the chaotic comic vibe of star Celeste Barber, this eight-part Australian comedy about a misfit’s collision with the wellness industry doesn’t take the opportunities it hints at. A redemption tale that’s too neatly mapped out, Wellmania’s snarky commentary and sotto voce objections make for a droll, somewhat shallow series.