Small Prophets, the six-part comedy that Mackenzie Crook created, wrote and directed for the BBC, reaches Apple TV with a premise that sounds like a dare: a man who works in a DIY store tries to grow tiny fortune-telling spirits in his garden shed, so that they can tell him whether the woman he loves is ever coming back. Pearce Quigley plays Michael Sleep, whose partner Clea disappeared seven years ago. Michael Palin plays his father, Brian, the man who hands him the recipe. The series has already aired in the UK; Apple bought it for viewers everywhere else.

The recipe is both the joke and the point. Apple’s own synopsis lists the ingredients as rainwater, horse manure and “more than a little alchemy”, and names the goal: homunculi, magical spirits that can predict the future. Michael has a single question for them. Will he ever see Clea again? Nobody in Small Prophets is trying to save the world. A middle-aged man has run out of ordinary ways to wait, and the only method still on the table involves a glass jar.

Apple describes the rest of the set-up in the same plain terms. Michael has lived a very ordinary life since Clea vanished: he works at the store, visits his dad and hopes. He approaches the experiment with some scepticism. His young coworker Kacey, played by Lauren Patel, ends up helping him, and the two bond partly over their shared dislike of the store manager, Gordon, played by Crook himself. Next door, the neighbours played by Sophie Willan and Jon Pointing become obsessed with what is happening in the shed.

A Renaissance recipe in a Manchester cul-de-sac

Crook did not invent the creature at the centre of the show. The homunculus belongs to the history of European alchemy. In De natura rerum, a sixteenth-century treatise attributed to Paracelsus, the recipe for an artificial little human involves incubating it in horse dung. The manure in Brian’s recipe is a direct line back to that text, and it suggests Crook did the reading before he made the joke.

What he does with that reading is move it somewhere it has no business being. The series is set and filmed in Greater Manchester, in residential streets in Urmston and around Stockport, between a DIY superstore and a row of houses where, in Apple’s synopsis, the neighbours are obsessed with what is going on in the garden shed. One of the strangest beliefs of the Renaissance, the idea that a person could be grown, ends up in the most ordinary British setting available: a suburban garden, a hobby, a fence.

British critics, who saw the full series when it aired, described how the device works. Helen Hawkins at The Arts Desk wrote that Michael grows the creatures in big glass jars, following an ancient formula; that once cultivated correctly they briefly gain the power of divination and are incapable of not telling the truth; and that the series presents three different homunculi, which she called bizarre-looking and wholly convincing. Apple notes that animation elements run through the series. The animation is credited to Ainslie Henderson and Will Anderson.

From the Detectorists field to the garden shed

Many viewers outside Britain know Crook from Detectorists, his earlier BBC comedy about two men who walk fields with metal detectors, waiting for the ground to give something back. The connection is direct. Quigley played Russell in Detectorists; here Crook hands him the lead, and moves himself into the smaller role of the unpopular manager.

The two series share a temperament. Both are about patience, about men whose hobbies look ridiculous from the outside and carry something serious underneath. But Small Prophets turns the search around. The detectorists wanted the past to surface. Michael wants the future to speak, and he is willing to mix rainwater and manure to make it happen.

Around Quigley and Palin, the cast reads like a short history of recent British comedy. Willan won a BAFTA for Alma’s Not Normal. Pointing comes from Big Boys. Paul Kaye, known internationally for Game of Thrones, plays Roy, Clea’s brother. Patel is known for Waterloo Road. Shola Adewusi plays Olive, another neighbour. Palin, of Monty Python, plays a father who is apparently the household’s keeper of old formulas. The premise suggests a show more interested in a street full of people than in a single magical effect.

Why Apple bought a series that had already aired

Apple TV builds most of its slate from originals made for the service first. Small Prophets is the opposite case: a BBC commission, produced by Crook’s Treasure Trove Productions and Blue House Productions, which had already completed its run on BBC Two and iPlayer before Apple acquired worldwide rights. AppleInsider described it as a rare deal for the service, which had previously worked with the BBC on Trying, a comedy produced for Apple from the start.

The critical record explains the purchase. The Guardian and The Times both gave the series five stars, with The Guardian calling it a show full of gorgeous surprises, and The Telegraph gave it four. Apple’s announcement cites a perfect critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and the Best Series award in the International Panorama competition at Series Mania. The bet is that a comedy made of very local ingredients, a DIY store, a cul-de-sac, a shed and a recipe from a sixteenth-century treatise, can find an audience that has never set foot in Greater Manchester.

That bet also shapes what the audience is promised. The marketing sells a magical comedy with a perfect score. The premise sets up something heavier: a disappearance story, where the comic surface is the way the show approaches a missing person without staring straight at the absence. The laughs in this kind of British comedy usually do that work, keeping a question at arm’s length so it can be asked at all.

What to know before watching

Is Small Prophets based on a true story? No. It is an original story by Mackenzie Crook. The homunculus itself comes from real alchemical writing, but Michael, Clea and the shed are fiction.

How many episodes are there? The first series has six episodes.

Who is in the cast? Pearce Quigley, Michael Palin, Lauren Patel, Sophie Willan, Jon Pointing, Paul Kaye, Shola Adewusi and Mackenzie Crook.

When and where can I watch it? Small Prophets premieres on Apple TV with its first two episodes on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, followed by a new episode every Wednesday through November 4, 2026. The UK is the exception: the series aired on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer between February and March 2026 and will arrive on Apple TV there in 2027.

Will there be a second season? Yes. The BBC renewed Small Prophets on September 8, 2026, for a second series due in 2027. Crook described it as the chance to tell “the second half of this strange story”.

The homunculi, the reviews say, cannot lie. That is the real risk Michael takes in the shed. Seven years of waiting have been bearable precisely because nobody could answer him, and a creature compelled to tell the truth could hand him the one thing he has spent those years avoiding.