Unfamiliar: When Reality Breaks Down And Humans Do Too

 Every so often a television series arrives that doesn’t so much step onto the screen as stomp into your living room, kick over the coffee table and demand you pay attention. “Unfamiliar” is one of those shows, a strange, swaggering beast that looks like prestige drama but behaves more like a pub argument after closing time.

On the surface, it’s simple enough: ordinary people suddenly confronted with events that make no sense at all – places that shift, memories that don’t line up, rules of reality that seem to have been written by a bored teenager with a malfunctioning laptop. Instead of brave heroes calmly “processing their trauma”, we get people reacting the way real humans do: badly. They swear, they panic, they make idiotic decisions, then double down on them with the grim determination of someone insisting their sat‑nav “must be right” while driving into a lake.

Visually, the series is gorgeous in that slightly smug modern way: every frame looks like it’s been filtered through three layers of moody Instagram angst. Rain glistens, streetlights glow, shadows loom importantly in the background as if they too have a backstory and a Spotify playlist. Sometimes it works brilliantly, especially when the show leans into the unease of the unknown. At other times, you half expect a voiceover to start selling you designer aftershave called “Enigma” for people who “live on the edge of reality”.

Where “Unfamiliar” really earns its keep is in its humour, which is as dry as the Sahara and twice as abrasive. Characters confronted with cosmic horror respond with the emotional range of someone stuck behind a caravan on a single‑track road: irritation, sarcasm, and the occasional desire to burn everything down. When the script stops trying to be profound and lets the cast bicker, complain and misread every situation, it suddenly crackles with life. You can almost hear the writers muttering, “What would actually happen if normal people saw this?” – and then having the courage to follow through.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. The show sometimes confuses “mysterious” with “nothing happening very slowly”, dragging out scenes like a relative who won’t leave after Christmas dinner. Whole episodes float by in a haze of significant looks and cryptic hints that feel less like storytelling and more like being nudged in the ribs by someone whispering, “Big twist coming…” while absolutely refusing to get on with it. When “Unfamiliar” hits its stride, it’s gripping. When it doesn’t, you start checking your phone and wondering if the laws of time are also breaking down.

Yet, despite these sins, “Unfamiliar” has that rare, infuriating quality: you want to keep watching. Partly because it’s genuinely unsettling, partly because it’s often very funny, and partly because you’re determined to work out what on earth is going on before the characters do. It’s a show about the unknown that understands something crucial: the most frightening, fascinating, and ridiculous thing in any universe is still us, blundering through it, armed with nothing more than bad jokes and worse decisions.

Is “Unfamiliar” a masterpiece? Not yet. But it is bold, odd, and bracingly unwilling to hold your hand. Like a misbehaving sports car, it lurches, it oversteers, it occasionally stalls in the middle of the road – and somehow, that chaos is exactly what makes it worth the ride.