Eli is among the therapist characters currently populating the TV market, with last week's premiere of the second season of "Shrinking." The insertion of the psychiatrist at the story's center promises a probing look at minds in crisis. It's a hack to carry the narrative -- whether comedy or drama or supernatural thriller like "Before" -- into a deeper understanding of human emotions and behavior in crisis.
The challenge for these shows is to get the shrink out of their office and into the wild, where they're as vulnerable and mistake-prone as their patients. For Eli, the stakes are high. He's struggling with his own mental health while experiencing hallucinogenic memories of his wife's final days.
The widower is still in denial when there's a knock at his townhouse door. Enter 8-year-old Noah (Jacobi Jupe), pale, big-eyed, and nearly mute. The kid resembles an evil child from central casting, shifting from plump-cheeked cherub to Joffrey Baratheon in a blink. Jupe convinces as a boy in mental and spiritual peril, even when the character's behavior as written strains credulity.
When the emotionally raw Eli first encounters the kid at the top of his stoop, he interprets his arrival as a cry for help. But, no. The boy seems to know the house. His fingertips drip blood from scratching runes into the front door. And Noah seems to have a connection to Eli and his late wife that the doctor can't explain.
What's the link? Let the woo-woo begin.
As we'll soon discover, the underlying premise explores the esoteric notion of past lives regression, a theory that often involves children with uncanny memories that don't seem to be from their lives. Noah has a ruby birthmark on his solar plexus right where a doctor would have delivered CPR and speaks an old Dutch dialect.
The theory depends on a belief in reincarnation. The series title, "Before," suggests that if there is an afterlife, then logically a prior one exists, too. As this notion can lead to raised eyebrows and practices considered unethical by the American Psychiatric Association (like a reliance on hypnosis to liberate repressed memories), Eli finds himself adrift. Is he delusional? Is he a victim of mass hysteria? As he tries to diagnose Noah's mental disorder scientifically using sandbox therapy and blocks, Eli becomes increasingly erratic and uncertain about reality -- the kid's and his own.
Crystal is an interesting choice to shepherd audiences on this creepy voyage, created by Sarah Thorp. The once-boyish comic actor leans into the trauma drama, his unshaven face gray, his clothes unkempt. Although Crystal sometimes overdoes the sturm und drang, his downbeat humor and deft delivery of one-liners removes some of the overpowering gloom and grounds the scary sequences, of which there are many.
A fully-committed Crystal vibes with Rosie Perez as Noah's guardian, Denise. However, laden with a buffet of red-herrings, "Before" stalls in the second half. The series requires an epic leap of faith to give credence to the supernatural elements, but the uneven pacing, detours, and repetitions over 10 episodes (eight would have been better) challenges skeptical viewers to suspend disbelief.