What if there was a machine that could tell you your true life’s potential?

That’s the question “The Big Door Prize” Apple TV’s latest dramedy aims to answer for us with its three episode premiere now available.

The concept is intriguing. After all there are many of us who are constantly questioning if we are meeting the potential that we’re all capable of meeting. We take surveys online, why not have a machine in a store.

And when a mysterious machine appears in a small town general store, it turns the community upside down when everyone starts adjusting their lives to line up with what the machine tells their purpose is. They punch in their social security numbers and give them their fingerprints and a little card comes out. Its not an identity theft scheme nor does the outlook ever change for the individuals. It can be a job. A status. A skill.

We begin this journey following Dusty (Chris O’Dowd), a school teacher who’s just turned 40 and is happily married with a teenaged daughter. He’s at the center of the effects this machine is having on his family and neighbors, while he tries to decipher the origins of the machine with some of his students. I won’t tell you what Dusty actually gets on his card.

What we get is a decent start on what could be a promising show. Apple TV has got this TV production thing down. The cast is fine and it’s a 30 something minute dose, which works well.

Is this the next Severance? I don’t know. That’s a high bar.

But if the machine put money in itself, it would tell itself Apple TV dramedy. Its perfectly on brand for the streamer.

In closing, the Big Door Prize offers enough question marks delivered in an entertaining way that it warrants a look.

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