Apple TV's Near-Perfect Fantasy Series Adds Magic to an Award-Winning Sitcom Formula | Review

Published Oct 7, 2026, 3:01 AM EDT

Greer Riddell is a London-based culture journalist and critic writing on film, television, audience behaviour, and the wider media industry. She is a Writer and Social Media Coordinator at Collider and TV Editor at FILMHOUNDS.

Her recent collaborations include Netflix, Warner Bros., DC Studios, Hulu, and Disney+, producing features on titles including Saturday Night Live UK, Severance, Sitcoms, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Stranger Things. Her recent reviews include Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85’, Scrubs Season 10, and The Boroughs. Her work has also included coverage of UK film festivals and features published in Film Stories Magazine.

When Apple TV announced that it had acquired the international rights to the BBC comedy series Small Prophets, it represented an unusual move for the streamer. This was the first time Apple had added a program made, produced, and broadcast elsewhere to its library, rather than being involved in the production from the outset. It may seem like a wildly different business strategy, but Small Prophets is a remarkably safe bet.

The British comedy drama, created by Mackenzie Crook (The Office), aired on BBC Two earlier this year, on February 9, and has already earned an impressive 100% critics' score on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. The six-part series stars Pierce Quigley (The Gentlemen) as Michael Sleep and brought Monty Python legend Michael Palin out of semi-retirement to play Michael's father, Brian, after he was so taken with the script that he agreed to return to television comedy at the age of 82. Small Prophets brings small-town fantasy and Crook's subtle comedy to America, and it's far more poignant and human than you might expect from a show centered on growing homunculi in a garden shed.

What Is 'Small Prophets' About?

When Crook first appeared on British television as Gareth Keenan in the original The Office, he seemed destined to become a solid comedic actor with an abundance of awkwardness. Although he subsequently appeared in huge Hollywood franchises, including Pirates of the Caribbean and Game of Thrones, over the past decade Crook has quietly built an equally impressive second career as a writer and director. His work has become synonymous with slow and curious sitcoms with stories that linger in your heart more than your mind.

His BAFTA-winning Detectorists followed two eccentric metal-detecting enthusiasts, Lance (Crook) and Andy (Toby Jones), as they navigated their personal lives while pursuing their passion for buried treasure. Across its 20 episodes, the series demonstrated Crook's gift for finding enormous emotional depth in people who might otherwise be dismissed as too peculiar to carry a story. Small Prophets continues to follow characters on the fringes of British society, but this time there is magic, there are homunculi, and there's a strange fantastical thread running through an otherwise entirely recognizable British suburban cul-de-sac.

Small Prophets follows Michael Sleep (Quigley), whose girlfriend Clea disappeared on Christmas Eve seven years earlier. His home sits at the end of a Manchester close, its rooms cluttered with boxes reaching the ceiling and a 1970s-style Christmas diorama permanently assembled in the living room. Michael seems to have almost checked out of life since Clea disappeared. He goes to work at a hardware store, antagonizing customers alongside his new younger colleague and friend Kacey (Lauren Patel), while his neighbors Clive and Bev (John Pointing and Sophie Willan) watch his every move from behind the curtains with equal measures of frustration and fascination. As nosy neighbors, Clive and Bev embody Britain's eternal fascination with people who do anything even slightly outside what society considers normal. They're the local Facebook or neighborhood WhatsApp group, and Small Prophets makes you soon realize that they may really be the weird ones.

'Small Prophets' Subtle Comedy Champions the Great British Oddball

Image via. BBC, Apple TV

Michael's unlikely friendship with Kacey is one of the series' most important relationships. She is young, ambitious, and dreams of a life far beyond the DIY store, but she also understands Michael's cynicism, and she brings out his softer side. Small Prophets makes a point of allowing a friendship between a younger woman and an older man to exist without turning it into a romance. Crook's character makes a joke about the possibility of completely shutting down that thread. Michael and Kacey may be separated by a generation, but they are experiencing similar frustrations. They both feel stuck in a place that seems too small for them, but they do not have the means to make meaningful change — something many viewers will connect with.

Quigley anchors the series effortlessly. Having previously played Russell in Detectorists, he is able to make Michael's awkwardness funny without turning him into a caricature and, crucially, the series never makes fun of him. Alongside giving Quigley his leading role, Crook wrote Michael's father, Brian Sleep, specifically for Michael Palin. Brian was once a globe-trotter but now lives in a care home suffering from dementia, and Palin's performance tugs at the heartstrings of anyone who has experienced an elderly relative losing their memory firsthand. You initially assume Brian's stories are the product of old age and exaggeration, but Michael discovers his father's journal, complete with photographs of homunculi. These creatures are tiny, humanoid beings who can answer any question with the truth. Michael is desperate to know what happened to Clea. Did she deliberately leave him? Is she alive? Did she ever really love him? He will try anything to find out.

Crook has a habit of championing the Great British oddball, people whom audiences, and perhaps even other writers, might not initially consider interesting enough to become the main character of an entire television series. It's precisely what makes his work so effective. In Detectorists, the members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club might seem eccentric from the outside, but Crook shows that they are all living complete lives, full of passion and private struggles. It doesn't matter what the status quo thinks or whether society considers their hobby normal, and Small Prophets applies that same philosophy to Michael. He is a fundamentally kind man who has withdrawn from society, but his friendship with Kacey slowly brings him back towards it. Even the smaller characters receive a level of attention.

Crook plays Gordon, Michael and Kacey's boss at the DIY store, who epitomizes the British jobsworth — clipboard, schedules and pedantry aplenty. Another eccentric neighbor, played by Shola Adewusi, proudly shows Michael her new lawn, only for it to be revealed that she has been scammed into buying a green paisley carpet instead of AstroTurf. This is Crook's greatest strength — he notices the strange and amusing details of ordinary life and shows them back to us.

The fantasy elements are consequently much stranger because they're surrounded by such mundane reality. As the homunculi grow and mature in their jars in the shed, increasingly bizarre events begin occurring around the neighborhood. A stain appears on the road in the shape of a rabbit. A meteor hits the roof of Michael's house. Michael is nearly mugged on his way home from the shop, only for his attacker to back away after apparently mistaking him for Father Christmas. The magical energy surrounding the homunculi seems to have altered the climate of the entire area, and we're drawn into watching it too.

'Small Prophets' Grounds a Wild Fantasy Premise in Mundane

For a BBC Two series billed as a comedy, Small Prophets has quite a wild fantasy premise. The homunculi could very easily have looked ridiculous. Instead, they've been created with remarkable care by McKinnon and Saunders, the stop-motion studio behind Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, by blending practical effects and CGI. Think more puppetry than Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s not hard for us to accept them.

Despite its supernatural element, Small Prophets is ultimately a story about grief, loss, loneliness and hope. The magical and improbable moments are balanced by an extraordinarily mundane depiction of British society. That does, however, mean the series occasionally becomes a little corny. There is no bad language, no great controversy, and very little desire to push the boundaries of comedy itself. If you prefer darker comedy or something more overtly witty, some of the series' humor may feel juvenile. Perhaps taking enormous swings while simultaneously taking such a huge fantasy leap would have overwhelmed the emotional core. So with Crook’s everyday observational humor instead, the fantastical elements remain strange without drowning out the humanity underneath.

Small Prophets is what happens when the magical and the mundane collide. Mackenzie Crook has taken everything that made Detectorists quietly remarkable — its slow pacing, eccentricity, gentle humor and human warmth — and added a fantastical layer that surprises without undermining the emotional core. Pierce Quigley balances deadpan delivery with a sweetness, making Michael someone you ultimately root for. By following Crook's recurring themes of not following society's rules, embracing your individuality, and stopping long enough to notice the everyday things happening around you, sometimes, that is where the magic exists.

Small Prophets is streaming on Apple TV internationally (outside the United Kingdom) beginning October 7. The BBC has also greenlit a second season.

Cast

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  Pearce Quigley

  Michael Sleep

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  Brian Sleep

Pros & Cons

• Mackenzie Crook's repeats the subtle and heartfelt humor of Detectorists with a fantasy twist.
• Pierce Quigley shines as Michael Sleep, making us root for his absurd homunculi plan.
• Small Prophets finds humor in the mundane through its authentic portrayal of suburban British society.
• The homunculi themselves are beautifully depicted through practical effects.

• The humor is tame and often family-friendly, meaning the series isn't always laugh-out-loud funny.