Locke & Key (2011)

Director: Mark Romanek
Writer: Josh Friedman, based on the graphic novels by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
Stars: Miranda Otto, Mark Pellegrino, Sarah Bolger, Nick Stahl, Ksenia Solo, Skylar Gaertner and Jesse McCartney

Index: Unsold Pilots

There are probably a lot of ways to start an Unsold Pilots project but Locke & Key seems like the perfect one because there’s a long history that highlights how complicated the process is to bring a well known and successful property to television. It doesn’t hurt that my better half is a huge fan.

Locke & Key started out as a comic book, one with a huge name as writer, Joe Hill, who’s one of Stephen King’s sons, each of whom found a success of their own. It ran for six stories over six years, from 2008 to 2013, to great acclaim. It was inevitable that it would be adapted into something by someone at some point.

That turned out to be a TV show developed for Fox for their 2010-11 season. The pilot was made but not aired, though it was screened at San Diego Comic-Con. However, Fox passed on it, so no show was made.

In 2014, it was reworked to become a trilogy of feature films, but they weren’t made.

Then another pilot was ordered by Hulu in 2017 with a new cast including Danny Glover and Samantha Mathis. This pilot has not been circulated and Jay Fotos, colorist on the comic, told me that he’s never seen it. Hulu passed on it, of course, so no show was made.

Finally, Netflix picked it up, recasting again, and this is the show that was greenlit and ran for its intended three seasons, starting in 2020. That version is the one that’s widely available and easy to see. It took nine years to get to it.

What I’m covering here is the original pilot from 2011, which means that it was shot while the source comic was still being published. It’s not as polished as the 2020 take and the house isn’t as impressive, but it does sport a notable cast and crew and there are many moments of power that suggest that this could have been a strong show.

For those who haven’t experienced Locke & Key in any of its incarnations, it has to do with Key House, which has been home to the Locke family for two and a half centuries. The latest Locke is Nina, who moves there with her three kids after her husband Rendell is murdered by a student he was counselling. It’s been empty since Rendell’s brother Duncan moved out.

What makes Key House special are the keys hidden within it and the magic that happens when those keys are used. This pilot episode is called The Ghost Key because that’s the one that Bode, the youngest child at six, finds on their first day there. He tries it in every lock in the house until one works. It leads outside, but not in the usual sense because only our spirits can cross the threshold, leaving our bodies behind seemingly dead to anyone who finds them.

Bode finds that out only eight minutes in so we’re thrown right into the magic, but this is a setup episode to establish the mythos in play, so only one other key is even mentioned, the Anywhere Key. If you’ve seen the 2020 show or read the comics, you’ll know that there are many keys and they do many different things.

The other discovery in this pilot is Dodge, a girl who Bode discovers sitting at the bottom of the well in the wellhouse, a girl who knows his name. She’s the villain here, manipulating Sam Lesser, the boy who killed Rendell Locke. Both have sizeable roles here and bad things happen because of that.

Skylar Gaertner, the actor who plays Bode, is the only one who wasn’t established at this point, though he was only seven years old. He was chosen for this role by Steven Spielberg, who was a producer on this pilot, which didn’t guarantee that it would be picked up for a full season. Gaertner is excellent here, as a bright and inquisitive kid who’s always willing to go out and do things, usually after being ignored by his two siblings, so it isn’t surprising that he’d go on to big things, mostly on television, playing the young Matt Murdock in Daredevil and Jonah Byrde in Ozark.

His screen sister Kinsey is Sarah Bolger, an Irish actress already notable for the TV show The Tudors and movies like In America and The Spiderwick Chronicles. She’d move from this to Once Upon a Time and Into the Badlands. She has a lot less to do here than their screen brother Tyler, played by Jesse McCartney, who’s given most of the showcase scenes that don’t go to Gaertner as Bode, including a powerful one at school, during which he revisits during lunch the trauma of seeing his father murdered. She does give as good as she gets though.

McCartney may be best known nowadays as a singer, both in Dream Street and solo, but he started out on the soap All My Children and has carved out a third career as a voice actor, with many roles as one of Alvin’s chipmunks.

Mum is Miranda Otto, who played Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings movies, Rendell is Mark Pellegrino, Lucifer in Supernatural, and Uncle Duncan is Nick Stahl, who was John Connor in the third Terminator movie and Yellow Bastard in Sin City. They’re supporting characters to the kids here, but they would have grown.

None of these are minor names to share an unaired fifty minute pilot and, given the focus on the Locke family, I haven’t even mentioned Ksenia Solo from Lost Girl and Black Swan as the villain Dodge yet. The names extend offscreen too, not least to director Mark Romanek and writer Josh Friedman.

Romanek wrote and directed One Hour Photo, while Friedman is writing films in the biggest franchises there are, like every Avatar sequel, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and the upcoming Fantastic Four movie.

Both did good work here, this being a tight thriller of a pilot. There’s a murder in the first few minutes, but while we know whodunit, we don’t know the context as to why. Then we’re introduced to the core cast but still get to the first use of the Ghost Key well inside the first ten minutes.

McCartney gets plenty of dramatic scenes as Tyler, embarrassing Kinsey in the process and fleshing out background for the murder, while Bode’s characterful before his spirit soars free outside and especially before he meets Dodge in the wellhouse. “Are you my echo?” he asks. “Yes, Bode, I am,” comes the scary reply.

Maybe it’s a little long. Certainly it doesn’t look as good as the 2020 show, with Key House itself far less immersive. But it’s still strong.

So Would I Watch This Show?

Absolutely. While I know how the story goes from later, I’d have wanted to find out in 2011.