CRYSTAL LAKE – Season One (2026)

There’s just something about Pamela Voorhees. Behind that powder-blue sweater and Betsy Palmer’s charm in the original Friday the 13th (1980) lies a delicious incongruity. How could a motherly, milk-and-cookies Reagan conservative turn a machete or meat cleaver on us? Or, presumably, hide beneath a bed while teenagers smashed like hyenas above, waiting for the perfect moment to spear a young Kevin Bacon through the mattress and throat?

Pam was a special kind of cinematic psychotic: one capable of getting under Gene Siskel’s skin so deeply that he revealed the ending in his review, doxxing Palmer by printing the town where she lived and encouraging hate mail in the process. The “bitter old lady” he described was actually a wounded parent with a sympathetic, if grisly, vendetta—closer to our next-door neighbours than her boogeyman son would ever get. Palmer has little time to work with, yet leaves such a mark as Pam—violating our sense of safety and being darkly hilarious while doing so—that a spin-off focusing on her was long overdue.

The unlikely pairing of A24 and Peacock finally gives us Mrs Voorhees’s full backstory in the first season of Crystal Lake. Blending sober revisionism with playful nostalgia, the series is as gruesome, funny and bizarrely tender as you’d imagine—and as over-explanatory as you hoped it wouldn’t be. In a year that has brought Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) and Mike Flanagan’s rival Carrie miniseries, it’s not a particularly subversive or hip take on classic horror. Instead, it harks back to the slasher sub-genre and to various aspects of American culture and history from the 1950s to the 1970s. The result is a sweet piece of Halloween candy for Friday fans, though it’s just a little too chewy.

Pam’s villainous reveal at the end of the original Friday the 13th remains one of horror’s most Scooby-Doo moments. So it’s only fitting that the sweater and machete go to the actor who so faithfully brought Ms Velma Dinkley back to life. Linda Cardellini is the show’s greatest strength, taking us through Pam’s slow, quirky descent into madness while infusing her with pathos, earthiness and humour.

It’s 1972. In the opening, Pam is covered in blood and picking a human molar from her knuckle, so we know there’ll be no shortage of murderous shenanigans. We flash back nine months (insert devilish wink) to the summer of ’71 and glimpse a Pamela we’ve never known: a shaggy-haired, warm-hearted, cool mum with a hug for the world. She works as a cook at Camp Crystal Lake while taking to single parenthood with a recognisable yet very different Lil’ Jason Voorhees (Callum Vinson).

Here, Jason is a bright, talkative burst of childhood innocence and energy. The series trades one form of political incorrectness for another by making him epileptic instead of intellectually disabled, while keeping his signature deformed features. Within the first five minutes, we see mama-bear Pam cuddling up with adorable rascal Jason and trying to sing him to sleep. I’m not ashamed to admit it made me cry. A dark cloud of dramatic irony hangs over the scene, giving us perverse monster sympathisers a knowing nod before the inevitable bullying and drowning.

The basic plot remains much the same: evil little kids, teenage camp counsellors too busy shagging to keep an eye on the lake, and Jason’s supposed demise in the water. It’s made a little more tragic by the fact that he goes to retrieve a volleyball for his only friend, Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom). But the story’s return to 1972, with jumps back to ’71 and even ’59, is far from lazy rehashing. Crystal Lake’s use of the town’s name as its title hints at the Twin Peaks-style small-town horror it’s aiming for. It nails that in some respects and misses the mark entirely in others.

Now working as a high-school lunch lady and still clinging to the hope that Jason is alive, Pam navigates grief and self-repression in an endearing 1970s community of Crystal Lake residents.

Police Chief Levon Brooks (Will Catlett), an ex-Newark cop with a murky past, tries to put his worries aside while courting Pam—and to justify his newfound provincialism to his wisecracking journalist sister, Briana (Devin Kessler). Rita (Joy Suprano) dabbles in second-wave feminism and New Age trends, and enjoys waterbed sex with Deputy Dorf (Cameron Scoggins), a ninja-star enthusiast. Meanwhile, coffee is always brewing at the local diner, where the blue-collar comic relief gathers. The most memorable is our beloved bucket-hatted, bicycle-riding doomsayer Ralph (Nick Cordileone), now a traumatised Vietnam War veteran.

The arrival of two mysterious goons, and their quick but messy deaths at Pam’s hands when they try to kidnap her, signal an ill-advised subplot. It’s hinted at further in her hazy visions of a lab (more on this below). What the subplot releases in Pam is far more interesting: anxiety and remorse gradually transform into a violent acceptance of self. The series uses a bear as a visual motif to track her primal awakening, positioning her—less than subtly—as a figurative, literal mama bear who’ll defend her cubs at all costs, while revelling a little too much in the bloodshed.

Pam attends an Erhard Seminars Training (EST)-coded motivational workshop with Rita. The insufferable guru encourages her to ‘drop the mask’—which she nearly does by taking his head off with a bowling ball. As Pam grows closer to Grace, acting as a de facto mother after learning that she’s bullied at school and abused at home, it becomes clear that her tolerance for arseholes is wearing thin. She’s officially baptised as a killer when a heart-to-heart with Grace’s vitriolic mum ends with a meat tenderiser to the face. Neil Diamond’s ‘I Am… I Said’ blasts on the soundtrack, Pam lights a celebratory cigarette, and we have our wrongly lovable Mrs V.

Chief Brooks is hot on the trail of the killings, unaware that his friend and occasional midnight kink-mate is becoming a slasher. When the skinned body of hitchhiker Willow (Oona Roche) is found, dispatched more brutally than the others, we’re as curious as he is. Is there a second murderer roaming the woods, perhaps one masked by a burlap sack?

Crystal Lake reaches its peak for old-school Friday fans in the sixth episode, which recreates the original film’s first two kills almost frame for frame, with point-of-view stabbings of horny counsellors Claudette (Danielle Kotch) and Barry (Phoenix Parnevik). An interesting twist, some unabashed ‘Kill them, Mommy!’ fan service and one glorious hippie massacre later, we’re almost ready for the conspiracy-thriller filler that’s about to unfold. Almost.

As Briana helps Chief Brooks dig deeper into the initial killings, Hamish Linklater arrives as a shady chemical corporation’s hatchet man, bringing with him the mysterious Project Argonaut. The seventh episode comes perilously close to unforgivable absurdity in a franchise that’s already launched its antagonist into space, but it’s undeniably intriguing. Pam reveals her past to Chief Brooks and Briana, taking us back to the 1950s and her pregnancy with Jason in a very Todd Haynes-esque episode. Cardellini shows off her dramatic chops, conveying the period’s polite suffocation, patriarchal malfeasance and Cold War mania in a chapter that really didn’t need science fiction.

The episode touches on actual experiments conducted on women and children in America during the post-war nuclear craze, most notably the 1945–47 Vanderbilt ‘Nutrition Study’, in which pregnant women were given radioactive iron in milkshakes so researchers could study its effects on their unborn children. The cockroach chemistry and super-growth angle is worthy of a facepalm, however, and leads into a final episode that’s far too convoluted. There is, at least, a bloody reunion that tugs at and severs our heartstrings at once.

More time could—and should—have been devoted to Pam and Grace’s relationship. Cardellini and Sundstrom bring a bittersweet chemistry to their scenes that runs deeper than anything else in the first season. Small details about Jason only make us want more scenes with the central characters: his first machete comes in a Ranger Rick kit, his future killing shack serves as a fort for him and Grace, and his toy drawer also holds a revealing stash of Playboy magazines.

Still, showrunner and head writer Bradley Caleb Kane does a good job of keeping Crystal Lake relatable to modern audiences while rooting it firmly in the 20th century. Grace’s difficult coming of age and search for a female role model—first in mean girl Claudette, then carefree flower child Harmony (Manon Gage), and finally Mrs V—is timeless. The show’s observations on America’s seismic cultural shifts are suitably time-capsuled.

Pam’s slide into reactionary conservatism when Harmony’s gaggle of hippies arrive at Camp Crystal Lake, sporting names such as Plato, Shutterbug and Space Ghost, feels true to the period and is openly amusing without tipping into caricature. Satirical jabs at conservatives and hippies, the ‘Me’ Generation, drug culture and its square detractors, along with some good old gallows humour, keep the season engaging even as the plot gets a little out of hand. There’s also something refreshing—if you’re an elderly millennial fart like this reviewer—about the absence of smartphones. Characters connect with and mangle one another without buzzwords or digital barriers. When Jason gets an Instagram account, we’ll all be in big trouble.

The show’s style is another plus. It meticulously recreates the Friday vibe while adding flourishes of its own. The opening credits of the first episode are stellar, combining freeze-frame zooms, cheesy 3D title-card effects, demented Harry Manfredini strings and horns, and plain-Jane white credits to make the Jason faithful giddy. The gore is more mixed, shifting from terrible CGI to gloriously disgusting practical effects, sometimes within the same scene. Willow and an unlucky rabbit fare the worst of all the victims (sensitive viewers, beware; anatomy nerds, be on alert).

Overall, Crystal Lake’s debut season is flawed but highly enjoyable. Its only real drawback is having a little too much runtime to fill. It’s not what you’d expect from A24 taking on the Friday the 13th empire, but then again, In a Violent Nature (2024) already exists.

Bonus points for Linda Cardellini delivering two banger Pamela Voorhees singing moments, sadly interrupted both times; for an appearance by future Camp Blood leader Steve Christy (Dan Thompson); and for casual drops of 1970s Americana, including Soul Train, the Pentagon Papers, Angela Davis, Nixon bemoaning ‘hopheads’ on TV and that especially strange sex scene in Harold Robbins’s novel The Betsy. Rita reading the latter aloud to the stone-faced dinerflies is priceless.

USA | 2026 | 8 EPISODES | 2.39:1 • 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writers: Bradley Caleb Kane, Bryan Fuller, Jen Silverman, Pia Wilson, Evan Endicott, Josh Stoddard, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Laura Marks & Arthur Imperatore (based on ‘Friday the 13th’ by Victor Miller).
directors: Michael Lennox, Celine Held, Logan George & Quyen Tran.
starring: Linda Cardellini, Will Catlett, Gwendolyn Sundstrom, Cameron Scoggins, Devin Kessler, Callum Vinson, Nick Cordileone, Joy Suprano & Hamish Linklater.