The premise of The Big Door Prize could be writ large from the shallow playbook of modern social media-powered life: a vending machine dispensing life-altering predictions in exchange for a shiny $2 coin. “In our culture we are more aware of what other people are doing than we ever were before; we are inundated with images on our phones of what great lives everyone else is achieving,” screenwriter David West Read says.

Based on the M.O. Walsh novel of the same name, The Big Door Prize presents a small American town with that very promise, beginning what looks certain to be a slow, unstoppable drift to the brink. “In the show, Dusty (Chris O’Dowd) cannot avoid the fact that all the other people in town are getting these incredible potentials and making these incredible changes. How long can you sit with who you are, even if you think you’re happy, when you see everyone else improving their lot?”

In the series, as with the book, the machine promises to dispense the customer’s “true potential”. But the machine hits its mark with chilling accuracy, and within the first few episodes, the lives of Dusty, his wife Cass (Gabrielle Dennis), the local preacher Father Reuben (Damon Gupton), local restaurateur Giorgio (Josh Segarra) and high school kid Jacob (Sammy Fourlas) have been deeply affected.

“The idea of this machine that can tell you your life potential, and the question, would you want to know what that is? I think it speaks to, in the real world, the idea that there is always another path,” Read says. “There’s always that idea of the choice you didn’t make, the door you didn’t open, and I just thought it was such a great premise for a TV show to explore that from so many perspectives.”

When M.O. Walsh’s book was first passed on to him, it was with the suggestion that Read may want to think about adapting it for television. “So I already had that in the back of my mind,” Read says. “But they also knew my taste really well because this is the kind of book that I would read for pleasure. I love things that have a light sci-fi element.

“I love the stories of George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, and things that are really about our real world, but the world of the book is slightly askew,” Read adds. “The book had an ending, and I was excited about removing that ending and seeing how much further you could go with this premise. Then, we just added characters, changed characters, and got in there exploring all the different versions of being told your potential and what that would do to a person.”

Though the series has an intriguing intellectual heft, and to some extent taps into the self-help culture of modern America, Read says there are no hidden messages in it. “I never want to be too preachy, so there’s no message that I’m trying to get across. But an idea I’m interested in exploring is looking sideways instead of within,” he says.

That the series opens on Dusty’s 40th birthday is significant, Read says. “I think there’s a prototypical midlife crisis around 40, but I think it’s also, to me, the idea that at 40, the window is still very much open. Life narrows your options, but at 40 there’s still time to change paths, and there is still time to do a major reinvention of self, if you so desire. I felt like that was the right age for this character who’s our way into a story about reinvention.”