SCREAMBOX Original horror series The Trouble with Tessa debuts with a two-episode premiere on July 15. The show follows a disgraced documentarian who unearths a box of old tapes and sets out to unravel the dark secrets buried in a seemingly perfect town’s past.

It’s been a while since I got to review a Screambox television series. I do love when they send me movies since those are my specialty, but getting the occasional show to review can be a lot of fun, too, since I get to look at an incomplete project and muse on where it might be going.

Today’s such offering is The Trouble With Tessa, a series with the strange tagline of “You’ll Get Fed”. That’s certainly ominous, though the first two episodes–what I got as part of the preview–does not yet bear that out in any way.

The title character, Tessa, is played by Katrin Nugent. Tessa is a documentarian that we learn early on is fleeing from the unnamed big city after a project they worked on rankled the wrong feathers. They left their boss, Aaron, behind to deal with the ramifications of their work while they make their way upstate to a rural town named Lowery for some much needed respite and escapism.

As Aaron predicts, however, it’s not long before Tessa finds their way into a new story they can’t resist. Inside the house they are renting is a box full of tapes, and Tessa is convinced they hear the moment a murder takes place on one of them.

Full of purpose–and wondering what the deal is with the home in which they are staying–Tessa begins combing the town for clues. And by the end of the second episode, they find themselves face to face with the possible killer from the tapes!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ First of all, the sounding editing and mixing on this series is extraordinary! I watched the two episodes with my headphones on, and the series constantly had me checking to see if what I was hearing was from the headphones or my house! It created an incredibly eerie and unsettling sensation while watching the show.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched anything where the sound design was that flawlessly incorporated into the viewing experience. Maybe not since Skinamarink. So I can’t give enough props to The Trouble With Tessa for their work on that aspect of the program.

+ Katrin Nugent gives a wonderful performance as the titular Tessa. They are quite the fish out of water as a city girl documentarian escaping from it all upstate in a rural town. They are a powerhouse as they navigate the various folk they run into and try to charm their way past them. They are definitely a high point in the series.

Through two episodes, we don’t get to see a LOT of range of emotion from them, but they convey everything the script requires of them quite well. They are mostly working at playing the townsfolk and using their natural charisma to get what they need, but they do display a bit of fear in episode one when they hear noises in the basement of their rental home. I assume as the series goes on, they will face even more terror.

– If possible, the series perhaps goes a little out of its way early on to make Lowery seem nefarious in just the first two episodes. I’d like to be a little hesitant to immediately side with Tessa–not because they aren’t a fun character, but because it would be more enjoyable to think they are maybe in the wrong. But after just these two preview episodes, were see shady librarians making phone calls behind Tessa’s back, bartenders that are reluctant to talk to them, and strangely pleasant neighbors. It’s all a bit Thriller 101.

And that’s fine! It certainly gets the viewer behind Tessa right away. But I was perhaps hoping for a little more nuance. We know that Tessa did something in the big city back home that might be less than admirable, but everything about Lowery that we get early on screams that they are unmistakably in the right here.

– The scenes where Tessa is speaking with her producer, Aaron, are a bit static for me. Aaron is just sitting in a strange booth or office, and Tessa is in their rental property, and it just serves to give some exposition and remind viewers of what they saw in the previous episode. I guess you need scenes like this in a series, but to me, they felt a bit forced, and they took me out of the moment. People Talking On The Phone are seldom particularly potent scenes in film or television, and nothing about that is changed here.

OVERALL

No star rating here, as it’s not fair to grade an incomplete project, but after two episodes, I’m pretty impressed with The Trouble With Tessa. I will definitely be keeping up with it. The technical aspects of the camera work and (most notably, again) the sound are extremely well done, and Katrin Nugent is a likable, talented star. I hope a lot of people get to check this out, because if the series continues as the early episodes go, this could be a great ride.