Forget Criminal Minds, This Overlooked Thriller Did Everything Better

Summary:

• The Booth at the End is a psychological thriller that premiered in 2010.
• It tells a story of a man at a diner helping strangers get whatever they want— at a cost.
• The show is 100% dialogue and 0% action, but it feels like we can see the action right in front of us.

There are so many criminally overlooked shows that deserve higher recognition than they got. We’re talking about The Booth at the End here — a show that not only makes you think but does so in an extraordinary way.

The premise of the show is simple and yet mysterious. A man sits at a booth in a diner. He presumably has a Gift, so people who want something come to him for help. He does not turn down anyone, but he asks them to do one thing in return for them. One task they must do to get anything they want. And then, once the task is complete, he grants the wish.

They never show us the tasks. All we see is this lone enigma of a man in a diner, talking to people, helping them get what they want. Sometimes these tasks are kind, like calling your father to tell him you love him. Sometimes they are straight-up weird, like getting pregnant, but you’re a nun.

The show’s strength is its 100% narration-heavy style. But they don’t spoon-feed you any lessons about human quandaries, nor do they shove the thought of the week into your face.

Remember Supernatural? Dean and Sam had these talks at the end of every Monster of the Week episode. Nothing like that is happening here. You draw your own conclusions, and you decide whether what the character did was good or bad.

The only disappointing thing was how anticlimactic the ending was. It basically ends on a cliffhanger. Although, in the era of Netflix canceling a lot of our beloved shows, this is something we’re used to. We still get a whole two seasons of amazing, dialogue-heavy interactions and moral dilemmas that would make a great board game to play at a party.

Check it out on Hulu and enjoy characters struggling to find an answer to the question: just how far are you willing to go to get what you want?