Goosebumps: The Vanishing streams on Disney+ beginning Friday, January 10.
R.L. Stine is not a character on Goosebumps, the latest hit TV series based on his hit book series. While co-creator Rob Letterman previously cast a bug-eyed Jack Black as Stine in the first of the Goosebumps movies, he arranged only a vocal cameo for the kid-lit author in the first season of the Disney+ adaptation of the same wildly successful source material. All the same, there is a certain sly meta dimension to the new small-screen Goosebumps, now entering its second season. In following both modern kids and their fortysomething parents, in splitting the action between present day and the 1990s (a.k.a. the decade when Stine began churning out his pre-teen paperbacks at a monthly clip), the series winks at its own attempts to court multiple demographics, to appeal to the young and the nostalgic alike.
Of course, a lot has changed over the past 30 years, including in the world of adolescent programming. While Goosebumps continues in season 2 to make intergenerational tension a focus, the real tension of the show is between one era’s definition of YA anthology and another’s. Once again, the creators have crammed the square peg of Stine’s preteen paperback yarns – his one-off, quick-read campfire tales of small-town spookiness – into the round hole of a serialized teen soap opera. It remains an imperfect fit.
Season 1 ended in what seemed like a cliffhanger but appears to have turned out to be a classic, inconclusive Stine twist instead: No, we won’t be picking up with the plucky young heroes of Port Lawrence High, or seeing how they manage to once more vanquish the author’s most popular villain, the malevolent marionette Slappy the Dummy. Season 2, subtitled The Vanishing, tells a new story in a new locale, following a group of Brooklyn teens as they become tangled in a missing-person investigation involving an abandoned research facility. All the same, the dual-decade formula of this Goosebumps incarnation remains intact, as the kids uncover the events that have haunted their parents since 1994, when a classmate went missing during a trespassing incident.
In present day, the vanished boy’s younger brother has become a botanist and single father played by David Schwimmer, who fills the veritable cast chaperone role occupied by Justin Long in season 1. (Talk about a lateral move in the matter of dweeby grown-up star power!) “Don’t go in the basement,” this not-quite-mad scientist repeatedly warns his twin offspring – one a type-A overachiever (YouTube star Jayden Bartels), the other a shiftless underachiever (Sam McCarthy) – when they come to stay with him for the summer in Gravesend. Though he’s technically a little old to portray a guy who was a teenager in 1994 (the year Friends premiered!), Schwimmer has some fun with the character: He summons the dorkiness that delivered him to primetime fame, and then – like Long before him – puts a more sinister spin on this seemingly harmless authority figure.
Around the sitcom veteran, Goosebumps assembles another Scooby Gang of wholesome high-schoolers, including the misunderstood bad girl (Francesca Noel) who Bartels’ debate champ ends up romancing, and the congenial delivery driver (Elijah M. Cooper) the others hit up for rides. The kids are all right – maybe too much so. Even the requisite love triangle reaches an amicable impasse, as if the showrunners were afraid to make anyone unlikable for long. After surviving a brief transformation into a plant-like monster, the most ornery and hostile of the young characters awakes all nice and enlightened, which makes you wonder about the therapeutic benefits of a stint as a pod person.
No one has quite enough personality – a problem that extends to the show itself, which remains a polished and sometimes generic streaming melodrama. Has Goosebumps itself been bodysnatched? While Stine focused mainly on middle-school-aged kids (they were proxies for his target readership), this new TV version smooths out older teenage life for the presumed audience of sheltered Disney+ viewers. Rarely has Brooklyn looked so nondescript, so suburban. And though the show has secured directors as varied as Gillian Robespierre (Obvious Child) and Oz Rodriguez (Vampires vs. the Bronx), there’s little recognizing their specific contributions. (Only Eduardo Sanchez, one of the filmmakers behind The Blair Witch Project, puts his mark on the material… mainly because his episode contains long stretches of faux home-video footage.)
Goosebumps comes alive most when it resembles, well, Goosebumps. Between scenes of chaste romance, the kids narrowly escape various Roger Corman-grade monsters lifted, loosely, from Stine’s Scholastic pageturners: a seeping blob, some hungry flora, a training-wheels Christine that blares System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” while it’s zigzagging madly down city streets. There’s a surprising amount of gore around the edges of the series, as when Schwimmer digs a hungry bulb out of his arm or turns to reveal a nasty ocular surprise. This stuff is very much in the spirit of the books, which left young readers emboldened by their own courage to keep reading, and feeling like they were getting something past Mom and Dad.
But the monsters that are Stine’s bread and butter have become almost secondary to the show’s equation. They’re basically accents on its aspirations to a tamer Riverdale or Stranger Things – a few Halloween thrills wedged between its stock teen drama and the kind of overarching mythology that’s frequently mistaken for a foolproof shortcut to bingeability. If you liked the first season of the show, there’s no reason to think you won’t like the second: Despite the all new cast and story, it’s more of the same. But regardless of your generation or your familiarity with Stine’s massive library of colorful titles and covers, you deserve more goosebumps than this Goosebumps provides.
