Chris O’Dowd likes his new “The Big Door Prize” series primarily because it’s offbeat, unusual. The AppleTV+ series, streaming Wednesday, is set in small town America and begins with a low-key surprise: A general store discovers a mysterious Morpho machine that supposedly reveals the residents’ life potential.
Put your hands on it and out pops a card which might say “Royalty.”
No one knows how the Morpho got there. No one is really sure what it does, much less how it works. But life — and lives — change.
“The Big Concept was the big draw,” a relaxed O’Dowd, 43, allowed in a Zoom interview, his Irish accent intact. “It’s a small town story with the Big Idea – that’s right in my wheelhouse.
“I’m playing an Irish guy in a show otherwise occupied by Americans. I think that’s always interesting because I seem to find versions of us everywhere – I hear there are one or two in Boston,” he said, straight-faced.
“I was drawn in initially by the concept and then I read the scripts. David West Read is such a good joke writer and has such pedigree off ‘Schitt’s Creek’ and he brought some of those thoughts with him.
“The idea,” he explained, “is in this small town, which is anywhere in America, people are given a choice to believe in this big idea — that the Morpho machine can predict their true life potential. Many of them decide to follow it. And that’s the concept I found interesting: The community is just believing in an idea and allowing that to change their lives for better or worse.
“It’s the lack of information that I found fascinating. That there is no explanation, no ‘This is why it’s here.’ ”
Mixing science fiction, comedy and fantasy, “It’s definitely got some Frank Capra stuff, hasn’t it?” O’Dowd allowed of the “It’s a Wonderful Life” filmmaker.
“There’s a lot of sci-fi stuff but the sci-fi is, as far as I’m concerned, a symbol for something else. For how easily led we are.
“But also it’s a reset. It’s not a book that was written about the pandemic or relevant to the pandemic but it is relevant to the pandemic because it entered that conversation about people deciding during the pandemic that they weren’t happy with their lives.
“It was such a kind of a collective reset for so many people to interpret if they’re happy or not. And the show talks to that a lot. Are you happy? And the pause that comes after my character asks that to his wife is much of what the rest of the plot is based on.”