"Crystal Lake," the long-delayed "Friday the 13th" prequel series from A24 and Peacock, premiered Thursday with all eight episodes released at once — and arrived with the best reviews of any entry in the 46-year-old slasher franchise.
Early tallies compiled before the premiere put the series at 86 percent positive from 28 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, according to Dark Horizons, which called the score the highest of any "Friday the 13th" film or show to date; a separate count by the fan site ComicBasics had the number slightly lower, at 85 percent from 27 reviews. Either figure clears every theatrical entry in the franchise, none of which has topped the low 60s on the aggregator. Both tallies are pre-premiere critics' scores and may shift as more reviews and audience ratings post.
A mother's unraveling, told from the inside
The series is a prequel set in the year before the original 1980 film, centered on Pamela Voorhees, a single mother in the fictional town of Crystal Lake still grieving her sickly young son Jason, who drowned in the lake roughly a year earlier. The arrival of two strangers asking questions about her past sets off a chain of events that leaves the townspeople wondering who she really is — and sets up her transformation into the killer of the original movie.
Linda Cardellini stars as Pamela, with Callum Vinson as young Jason, Nick Cordileone as Crazy Ralph, and Danielle Kotch and Phoenix Parnevik among the returning-character cast. Brad Caleb Kane, who previously worked on "It: Welcome to Derry," "Tokyo Vice" and "Warrior," created the series and serves as showrunner; Michael Lennox directed the first three episodes, Celine Held and Logan George the middle three, and Quyen Tran the final two. Victor Miller, who wrote the original 1980 screenplay, is among the executive producers, alongside Kane and Roy Lee. The show was first ordered in 2022, under creative stewardship that later changed before Kane took over, and it marks what trade coverage has described as the franchise's first live-action expansion in more than a decade.
Critics split over depth versus drag
Reviews converge on Cardellini as the show's center of gravity. TVLine gave the series a B-, calling her performance a "knockout" and describing the show as, in effect, a psychological study of how grief and trauma curdle into violence. The same review praised callbacks to the franchise's style, including a title-sequence score built on Harry Manfredini's original music, while faulting thinly drawn supporting characters and what it called "moments of extreme lag," particularly around a flashback episode it said "fails to earn its runtime."
Other critics were more mixed on the writing while still crediting the cast. Nick Schager, writing in The Daily Beast, described the show this way:
A return to Camp Crystal Lake whose gleeful, self-conscious absurdity fits a franchise defined by daffiness.
Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
TIME's Judy Berman was more skeptical of the premise itself:
It tries to extend a premise that was never especially rich in its original incarnation.
Judy Berman, TIME
Berman placed the series alongside other horror-franchise expansions, such as "Scream" and "The Purge," that have stretched thin source material across new formats. TheWrap's review likewise called the series "wobbly," arguing it leans too heavily on franchise obligations even as Cardellini elevates the material around her.
No second season or spinoff has been announced. With the full run available on Peacock as of Thursday, the next signal of the show's staying power will come from audience viewership figures, which Peacock does not typically disclose on a title-by-title basis, and from whether its reception holds up once general audiences — rather than advance critics — weigh in.
