The Innocents: 3 reasons this could be your late-summer binge-watch

Netflix’s The Innocents has slipped under a radar the bit thanks to Insatiable’s ongoing controversy, but a new trailer shows that it’s pretty intriguing.

August can be a somewhat rough month for TV. After all, most of the shows that run during the summer are coming to a close (like The 100), and new TV seasons don’t start until late September or even October at this point. So what’s a TV fan to do? Netflix is hoping you’ll try some of its new original shows, and one of those shows is The Innocents. (Another is Insatiable, but we’re not going to talk about it.)

We’ve covered it here and there at Culturess, but the most recent trailer actually has something resembling answers to the questions prompted by literally every other look at the series so far.

With that in mind, here are a few reasons you might be intrigued by it.

A resemblance to Stranger Things

If you like conspiracies, but don’t like how Stranger Things is honor-bound to jam in every ’80s pop culture reference that it can, The Innocents also has a generational science experiment gone horribly wrong. More accurately, there’s been some experimenting done, but it seems to be a natural ability per the YouTube description of the video.

That’s resulted in June McDaniel having the ability to become other people, without the ability to control it particularly well. It seems to be inherited, too, as she shares the same eye color with who appears to be her biological mother.

A bit of body horror

Changing your face and body doesn’t seem to be a seamless process, however. The special effects might leave a little to be desired (though they do look better than Venom‘s similar twitching and rapid body shaking), but they do look legitimately creepy.

That gets the point across. Additionally, the show has a TV-MA rating, so things could definitely get more gruesome in the eight episodes.

The length

No need to commit to a full 13 hours here. When it seems hard to pay attention to anything longer than about 30 seconds, having to only watch eight episodes instead of 13 seems like a gift. It won’t take up an entire weekend, and you don’t have to feel guilty about not having the binge-watching fortitude to immediately catch up like everyone else has.

The Innocents premieres Aug. 24.