The second episode of the redesigned Amazing Stories finds its legs with a story of a track star caught between life and death.

If showrunners Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz have anything even a fraction as good as this up their sleeves for the rest of the season, Amazing Stories might prove the strongest of Apple TV+ shows, considering its short episode order.

Amazing Stories, the Apple TV+ reboot of Steven Spielberg’s 1980s show about all things fantastical, bafflingly kicks off with a limp romantic fantasia. One can only hope that the dull opening episode, a rote time-travel story titled “The Cellar,” does not prove representative of what will follow.

Spielberg created the anthology series Amazing Stories in 1985. It was one of a handful of shrewd moves that, calculated to do so or not, turned his crowd-pleasing style into a brand. Cupertino clearly wanted to capitalize on Spielberg’s reputation as a storyteller. Regrettably, the reboot’s first episode does little but remind us that we’d rather be watching one of his movies instead.

Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited Amazing Stories anthology reboot is finally landing on Apple TV+ this Friday, but based on the first wave of reviews, you might want to pass. Apple sent out a screener of the first episode of Season 1 to a few news outlets. And so far, all the reviews have been overwhelmingly negative.