PremiereLens readSmall Prophets is a British comedy-drama that keeps grief and obsession in the same frame without softening either. Michael Sleep has spent seven years since his partner Clea vanished, and his response is to build Homunculi, magical spirits capable of predicting the future. The humor is dry and specific to him rather than broadly situational, and the mystery of what happened to Clea never resolves into anything reassuring.
The fantasy sits inside an otherwise grounded emotional world, which keeps the tone strange without tipping into whimsy. Michael's project is both genuinely odd and entirely logical given where seven years of unresolved loss can take a person; the two things coexist without the show winking at either. That balance, between the absurdity of what he is doing and the real cost of why he is doing it, gives the series its particular texture.