IT: Welcome to Derry is worth watching if you want more Stephen King mythology, grotesque creature horror and a richly realized version of Derry—but it is not the tightly focused coming-of-age story that made the 2017 film so effective. Early reviews were broadly favorable without being unanimous. Critics praised the series’ oppressive atmosphere, committed performances, period detail and dense network of Easter eggs, while questioning its crowded plotting, uneven character development and occasional dependence on conventional or computer-generated scares.
The eight-episode first season premiered in the United States on HBO and HBO Max on October 26, 2025, and concluded on December 14. The early critical sample covered only the first five episodes, so some initial complaints about pacing should be understood as provisional; the completed season nevertheless remains an ambitious, sometimes unwieldy expansion of the IT universe.
This review discusses the premise, themes and major references without offering a scene-by-scene episode recap.
The short verdict on IT: Welcome to Derry
The “total monster mash” description is a fair one. The series combines missing-child investigations, period drama, military conspiracy, grotesque transformations, social horror and Stephen King lore in a story set decades before the events of the Muschietti films. At its best, it makes Derry feel like a diseased community that has learned to live with evil. At its weakest, it overfills that community with plot threads, characters and mythology explanations.
Free tools Windows power users keep installed
One-click scans. No signup required.
#1 Best Overall
- Bright, clear picture: Bring entertainment to life on our 40" flat screen TV with bright 1080p Full HD—perfect for bedrooms, kitchens, and beyond. Roku Smart Picture cleans up incoming TV signals, optimizes them, and chooses the right picture mode.
- Seamless streaming: With fast Wi-Fi and apps that launch in a snap, Roku Select Series TVs get you to your entertainment quickly. You get excellent picture quality, clear sound, automatic updates, and more. It’s simple to use. Hard to outgrow.
- TV, simplified: With setup that only takes minutes, a simple-to-navigate Home Screen, and an uncluttered remote control that does all you need—Roku makes it easier to watch the TV you love.
- A world of free entertainment: Enjoy a huge selection of free live TV, news, sports, movies, shows, and much more—all just a click away.
- More streaming, less searching: With personalized picks right on your Home Screen, quick access to the sports and entertainment you watch most, and fast and easy search in one place—the days of endless scrolling are over.
That produces a show with a distinctive identity, but not a consistently controlled one. Viewers who want another straightforward Losers’ Club adventure may find the series diffuse. Viewers who enjoy franchise archaeology, atmospheric horror and stories in which institutions help conceal supernatural or human violence will find considerably more to explore.
| What to know | Details |
|---|---|
| Format | Eight-episode HBO fantasy-horror prequel series |
| Setting | Derry, Maine, in 1962 |
| Story focus | Children investigating disappearances as the Hanlon family and military personnel become entangled with Derry’s supernatural history |
| Key cast | Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Chris Chalk, James Remar and Bill Skarsgård |
| Creators | Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs |
| Season status | Season 1 is complete |
The aggregate scores reflect that mixed-positive response. At the time of writing, Rotten Tomatoes lists an 80% Tomatometer score from 166 critic reviews and an 82% audience score from more than 2,500 ratings. Metacritic lists a 61/100 critic score, categorized as “Generally Favorable,” based on 30 reviews, with a 7.0 user score from 87 reviews. These figures can change as additional ratings are added, but the overall picture is clear: critics generally like the show while disagreeing about how successfully it turns its ambition into sustained drama.
What is IT: Welcome to Derry about?
The series is a prequel to the 2017 IT film, set in 1962 before that movie’s story. A group of children begins investigating disappearances in Derry, while Leroy Hanlon and Charlotte Hanlon are drawn into the town’s wider history. Military personnel, including General Shaw, become part of the same expanding mystery.
That setup lets the show approach Derry from several angles at once. It is a child-centered mystery, but it is also a family drama, a period horror story and an account of how a town normalizes the inexplicable. Pennywise remains central, with Bill Skarsgård returning to the role, but the show is not structured as a simple origin story explaining every detail about the clown.
Windows Errors? Fix Them Before They Spread
Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallCrashes, No Sound, or Screen Glitches?
Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteThe principal cast gives the series an adult perspective that the films largely kept at the edges. Jovan Adepo’s Leroy Hanlon and Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann received particular critical attention, while Taylour Paige and the young ensemble help carry the story’s emotional and investigative sides. James Remar plays General Shaw. Critics often identified Chalk, Adepo and the child performers as among the strongest elements of the season.
Why critics responded to the series
Derry is the show’s strongest character
The production design gives the series a damp, oppressive sense of place. The 1962 setting is not merely a costume change from the contemporary films. Movie theaters, supermarkets, streets, military facilities and sewers all become spaces where ordinary life can tilt toward dread.
This attention to place also supports the series’ central idea: Derry is not just where Pennywise happens to hide. It is a community shaped by denial, repetition and selective memory. People disappear, violence is rationalized and institutions continue operating as if nothing unusual has happened. The period setting makes that social texture especially important, because the show’s horror grows from both supernatural forces and the limitations of the era’s institutions.
A Rotten Tomatoes review roundup and RogerEbert.com’s review both reflect the broader critical appreciation for the series’ atmosphere and production design. The show is often more effective when it lets a familiar location become threatening than when it presents a monster in full view.
The horror is varied—and sometimes very extreme
Welcome to Derry is not limited to clown imagery or one repeated jump-scare formula. Its horror includes missing children, body horror, creature transformations, institutional violence, racist hostility and the persistent fear that adults will refuse to see what is happening.
Several critics noted that human cruelty can be more disturbing than the supernatural material. That is an important distinction. The show’s social-horror elements are not simply a backdrop for Pennywise; they are part of its argument about how evil survives. Derry’s collective denial gives the supernatural threat room to operate, but the town’s existing prejudices and power structures create plenty of terror without any monster appearing.
Rank #2
- Bright, clear picture: Bring entertainment to life on our 24" flat screen TV with bright 720p HD—perfect for bedrooms, kitchens, and beyond. Roku Smart Picture cleans up incoming TV signals, optimizes them, and chooses the right picture mode.
- Seamless streaming: With fast Wi-Fi and apps that launch in a snap, Roku Select Series TVs get you to your entertainment quickly. You get excellent picture quality, clear sound, automatic updates, and more. It’s simple to use. Hard to outgrow.
- TV, simplified: With setup that only takes minutes, a simple-to-navigate Home Screen, and an uncluttered remote control that does all you need—Roku makes it easier to watch the TV you love.
- A world of free entertainment: Enjoy a huge selection of free live TV, news, sports, movies, shows, and much more—all just a click away.
- More streaming, less searching: With personalized picks right on your Home Screen, quick access to the sports and entertainment you watch most, and fast and easy search in one place—the days of endless scrolling are over.
The escalation is not always equally successful. When the show relies on atmosphere, implication or a carefully staged set piece, it can be genuinely unnerving. When it shifts to a large computer-generated creature or a familiar jump-scare mechanism, the effect can be less convincing. Reviews collected by Metacritic specifically identify some CG-heavy moments as weaker than the series’ more grounded or suggestive horror.
The performances give the mythology a human anchor
The season’s large ensemble is one reason its many storylines remain watchable. Adepo and Chalk were repeatedly singled out by critics, and the young performers provide much of the urgency behind the disappearances investigation. The adult characters also prevent the prequel from becoming an extended sequence of children confronting danger without a meaningful social context.
Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann is particularly important to the franchise architecture. Hallorann connects the show to The Shining and gives the wider Stephen King universe a recognizable human link. His presence is more useful than a random cameo would be because it expands the series’ sense of supernatural continuity while still serving the story’s investigation.
Where the first reviews were less enthusiastic
There may be too much show competing for attention
The series is juggling several substantial threads: the children’s investigation, the Hanlon family, military activity, Derry’s local history, the supernatural threat and references to other King stories. That density is part of its appeal for lore-focused viewers, but it can also make the season feel overstuffed.
Some early reviews argued that the show takes too long to establish characters who are as immediately compelling as the young protagonists in the films. Others found the plotting conventional even when the production was ambitious. The result is a pacing problem rather than a simple lack of incident: plenty happens, but not every development receives enough time to acquire emotional weight.
It is also important to separate the first-review context from the completed season. Critics initially received five of the eight episodes. Some early judgments that the show had not yet delivered its strongest material were therefore explicitly provisional. Even with all eight episodes available, however, the larger criticism remains reasonable: the series sometimes explains or introduces more than it can dramatically develop.
Recommended Free Tools
The social themes are ambitious but uneven
The 1962 setting allows Welcome to Derry to address racism, Native American erasure, military power and Cold War-era anxiety. These themes give the prequel more substance than a simple sequence of Pennywise appearances. They also reinforce the idea that Derry’s evil is communal: it is sustained by systems, silences and people who benefit from looking away.
Not every critic thought those themes were fully integrated. Some reviews regarded the treatment as surface-level or uneven, particularly when the social commentary appears to point toward a larger argument without giving every part of that argument enough development. The fairest assessment is that the themes are a meaningful strength of the concept and an inconsistent strength of the execution.
The show does not always know when to hold back
The strongest scares tend to come from the collision between ordinary life and something wrong beneath it. The weakest can feel like a reminder that the production has access to a large effects budget. Some digital creature reveals are less frightening than the buildup surrounding them, and familiar scare mechanics occasionally dilute the series’ more patient atmosphere.
That unevenness does not make the season ineffective overall. It does mean that viewers should not expect every horror sequence to match the most memorable moments from the films. The prequel is more successful as a sustained mood and an expanding mythology than as a perfectly calibrated scare machine.
Quick wins for a faster PC:
Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Rank #3
- 1080p Resolution: Watch movies and TV shows in high-definition picture quality.
- LED-backlit LCD screen: With reliable and long-lasting LED lighting, this LCD screen delivers a wide range of colors and contrast for a memorable viewing experience.
- Watch what you want: Stream over 1.5 million movies and TV episodes. Watch favorites with subscriptions to Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and more. Subscription fees may apply.
- All your entertainment in one place: Watch live and free TV, play video games, and stream music.
- Smart and always getting smarter: Fire TV adds new Alexa skills, features, smart home capabilities, and voice functionality all the time.
The Easter eggs and Stephen King connections
The series is packed with references, but they work best as connective tissue rather than proof that every detail is a direct adaptation of King’s novel. IT: Welcome to Derry draws on the novel, the 2017 and 2019 film adaptations and the wider King universe while creating a new television story.
References to IT and the films
Recurring imagery includes Pennywise, balloons, Derry landmarks and the town’s pattern of collective denial. These elements connect the series to the familiar mythology without requiring viewers to know every detail of the previous adaptations. Fans will receive additional value from the callbacks, but newcomers can follow the basic premise without having read the novel or watched the films.
The Christine classroom detail
One small classroom detail references King’s novel Christine. It is the kind of background nod that rewards attentive viewers without changing the central plot. TV Insider’s Easter-egg coverage identifies this and other details for viewers who want to catalogue the show’s references.
Dick Hallorann and The Shining
Hallorann is the most substantial wider-universe connection. His introduction links Derry to The Shining and broadens the series’ supernatural frame. Time’s coverage of Hallorann discusses why the character matters to the show’s mythology.
The Tool Desk
Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Watch the opening credits
The opening title sequence is part of the Easter-egg strategy rather than disposable decoration. It contains visual references and clues that fit the show’s larger interest in hidden histories and recurring imagery. SlashFilm’s breakdown of the opening credits is useful for viewers who want to examine those details more closely.
Do you need to watch the films or read the book first?
No. The basic story is accessible to newcomers. You do not need to have read the novel or watched the two Muschietti films to understand the children’s investigation, the Hanlon family’s involvement or the threat facing Derry.
Prior knowledge changes the experience rather than determining whether the plot is comprehensible. Fans will recognize references to the novel and films, appreciate Hallorann’s connection to The Shining, and notice how the series develops ideas that the earlier adaptations could only suggest. New viewers may be less distracted by continuity questions and can approach the show as a period supernatural mystery.
What’s actually slowing this PC down?
Pick the symptom - the matching free tool is one click away.
The ideal viewing order depends on what you value:
- For the cleanest chronological experience: watch Welcome to Derry before the 2017 and 2019 films.
- For the strongest appreciation of the callbacks: watch the two films first, then use the series as an expansion of their version of Derry.
- For the fullest King context: read the novel as well, while remembering that the book, films and series are separate interpretations.
Who should watch it?
IT: Welcome to Derry is a good fit for viewers who enjoy:
- Stephen King adaptations and interconnected King references;
- period horror with a strong sense of place;
- ensemble mysteries involving children and adults;
- gruesome creature design and body horror;
- stories where social institutions and community denial are part of the horror; and
- franchise mythology that rewards close attention.
It is a weaker match for viewers seeking the emotional simplicity and tight coming-of-age focus of the first IT film. It is also not “family horror” simply because children are central characters.
Content warnings
Expect intense horror violence, child endangerment, gore, disturbing creature imagery, racist violence and mature social themes. The series includes both supernatural brutality and realistic human cruelty. Viewers sensitive to violence against children or racist violence should approach it cautiously.
Rank #4
- 1080p Resolution - Watch movies and TV shows in high-definition picture quality.
- LED-backlit LCD screen - With reliable and long-lasting LED lighting, this LCD screen delivers a wide range of colors and contrast for a memorable viewing experience.
- Watch what you want - Stream over 1.5 million movies and TV episodes. Watch favorites with subscriptions to Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and more. Subscription fees may apply.
- All your entertainment in one place - Watch live and free TV, play video games, and stream music.
- Smart and always getting smarter - Fire TV adds new Alexa skills, features, smart home capabilities, and voice functionality all the time.
Where to watch and what happens next?
In the United States, the first season premiered on HBO and HBO Max and is complete. Availability, platform branding and licensing can vary by country, so viewers outside the U.S. should check their local HBO or licensed streaming listings rather than assume the same service is available everywhere.
Do these 3 things before closing this tab:
1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesAs for a second season, the responsible answer is still cautious. The creative team has discussed continuing the story and development reports exist, but the available reporting does not establish both a clearly confirmed formal HBO renewal and a premiere date. Coverage of the possible continuation should therefore be read as development news, not a release announcement. No confirmed season-two premiere date should be stated without a later official HBO announcement.
Final review
IT: Welcome to Derry is an uneven but worthwhile expansion of the franchise. Its atmosphere is consistently more impressive than its plotting, its performers make the sprawling human story watchable, and its best horror comes from treating Derry as a diseased community rather than merely a stage for Pennywise.
The show sometimes overexplains, introduces too many competing threads and settles for effects-driven scares that do not match its strongest mood. Yet its ambition is genuine. It offers a broader, stranger and more socially conscious version of the IT mythology, with enough Easter eggs to reward established fans and a clear enough premise for newcomers.
Recommendation: King and horror fans should watch it, especially if they enjoy dense franchise lore and period atmosphere. Go in with reservations about pacing, character depth and uneven effects—not with the expectation of an unqualified masterpiece.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is IT: Welcome to Derry a direct adaptation of Stephen King’s novel?
No. It is an HBO prequel series that expands ideas and mythology associated with King’s IT, the 2017 and 2019 films, and the wider King universe. It is a new television story rather than a scene-by-scene adaptation of the novel.
Do I need to watch the IT movies before Welcome to Derry?
No. The first season is understandable on its own. Watching the films or reading the novel first will make the callbacks, Pennywise mythology and Derry references more rewarding, but prior knowledge is not required.
Is IT: Welcome to Derry suitable for children?
No. Despite its young protagonists, the series contains intense horror violence, child endangerment, gore, disturbing creature imagery, racist violence and mature themes.
Has HBO confirmed a release date for season 2?
No confirmed premiere date should be stated based on the available reporting. The creative team has discussed continuing the story and development reports exist, but viewers should wait for an official HBO announcement regarding renewal and scheduling.
The Bottom Line
Bottom line: IT: Welcome to Derry earns a recommendation as an atmospheric, ambitious and frequently entertaining expansion of Stephen King’s Derry. Its monster mash of creature horror, period drama and Easter eggs is more compelling than its overcrowded plotting, uneven character work and occasional CG-heavy scares. Watch it for the mood, performances and mythology; do not expect the focused emotional punch of the first film.
Quick Recap
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
