Series creator: Brian K. Vaughan. P: Randy Sutter, Peter Calloway, Adam Stein, Steven Speilberg, Stephen King, others. Cast: Mike Vogel, Rachelle Lefevre, Alexander Koch, Colin Ford, Dean Norris, Jeff Fahey, Natalie Zea, Britt Robertson, Mackenzie Lintz. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Paramount Home Entertainment.

Under the Dome (the new TV blockbuster from The Two Steves, Spielberg and King) is agreeably daft, genuinely intriguing and expertly put together; the very acme of populist entertainment, in other words. First off: while the show is nominally based on King’s 2009 novel of the same name, a 1200-page monster teeming with around a thousand characters in his trademark small-town Americana mould, series developer Brian K. Vaughan has sensibly chosen to conflate many of these into a more manageable roster so the TV audience won’t need a checklist and clipboard to keep track of everyone. (Thank you, Brian.) Secondly, the writers have also – with King’s apparent blessing – ditched many of the author’s plot developments in favour of their own, which (from a skim-reading of Wikipedia’s synopsis of the novel) seems an even wiser decision.

So what’s it about? Tearing a fistful of leaves from a certain John Wyndham book, Under the Dome is a mystical science fiction drama set in Chester’s Mill, another fictional town in Maine, which abruptly one morning finds itself cut off from the world around it by a vast, transparent and unbreakable dome, which descends inexplicably to trap the townsfolk within. Light aircraft, cars and 16-wheel trucks which try to pass through it are left mashed, crumpled or in flames. Radios and mobile phones are useless. Cows and people unlucky enough to be in the path of the dome when it appears are chopped in half. This isn’t a government experiment gone wrong – the military are just as baffled as everyone else as to the reason for the dome’s arrival.

The dome is some kind of energy barrier, permeable enough to allow the ingress of air (so the townsfolk won’t suffocate), but apparently completely indestructible – as the Army finds out, when they rashly launch an ICBM at the thing (just, y’know, to see what happens). Realising that they can expect no help from the outside world, the town’s fiercely ambitious Councillor “Big Jim” Rennie (Dean Norris) spots an opportunity to cement his grip on Chester’s Mill, gradually introducing more and more authoritarian regulations designed to remove all challenges to his rule. Big Jim, by the way, has also made a deal with the local drug-lord Maxine Seagrave (Natalie Zea) to keep all drugs OUT of his town, in exchange for supplying the raw ingredients for Max’s mind-rotting produce. Big Jim has support from both the local sheriff (Jeff Fahey) and the town pastor, who’s not above getting high on his own supply and seems, in every way possible, the very definition of an unreliable crony. Sure enough, once the dome comes down, the pastor begins preaching fire and brimstone, recanting his evil ways and exhorting Big Jim to come clean before the whole town. Guess how well that goes down.

It turns out that one of Max’s enforcers, hunky ex-GI Dale “Barbie” Barbara (Mike Vogel), has been trapped inside the dome after a visit to one of Max’s deadbeat clients went tits-up, leaving him with a body to dispose of and no way of getting out. Barbie soon turns out to be the show’s de facto hero, albeit one with a bit more dirty linen than usual. Capable redhead Julia Shumway (Rachelle Lefevre) takes him in as a lodger, and – wouldn’t you know it – Barbie finds himself falling for her, as days turn to weeks and there’s no sign of the dome going anywhere. But there’s a slight complication: the body Barbie disposed of in the woods is Julia’s hubby, and she’s getting increasingly worried about where he might have gone…

Adding to the mystery, a handful of teens appears to have some kind of strange connection with the dome. Siblings Joe (Colin Ford) and Angie McAlister (Britt Robertson), newcomer Norrie (Mackenzie Lintz) and Big Jim’s borderline-psycho son Junior (Alexander Koch) have all separately experienced odd seizures, in which they are heard to mutter the same strange mantra: “The pink stars are falling.” Before long they realise that the dome has some arcane purpose in mind for them all, though what that might be they can’t begin to guess. Resourceful Joe, a geometry whizz and all-around geek, intuits that the dome may be generated by a power source located at its centre; and sure enough, deep inside the woods, they make another discovery – a much smaller replica of the dome, about the size of a beachball, inside which sits a small black egg filled with pink stars…

Things inside the dome quickly fall apart. Junior kidnaps Angie, for whom he’s had an unhealthy obsession since his high-school days, and keeps her chained in his dad’s old fallout shelter. Food and water shortages fray tempers to snapping point. The town sheriff is killed when he goes too near the dome, causing his pacemaker to explode. Big Jim kills the pastor in a similar fashion, pushing his head against the dome until his hearing-aid goes squelch, and soon turns his sights on Barbie, whom he correctly sees as a threat to his authority. Complications abound when gangster Max shows up in the town, looking to set up her own little empire of booze, drugs and illicit pleasures; not only that, she means to reclaim Barbie as her love-toy, and isn’t too fussy about removing Julia from the picture. But wait: deliverance may be at hand, in the form of a messianic “Monarch” (identity unknown) who may be one of our intrepid band of heroes – Barbie, perhaps? But he has other fish to fry, as Big Jim has managed to frame him for murder – and fully intends to see him hanged…

Under the Dome is solid entertainment in the Lost tradition, deftly building mystery upon mystery while maintaining a pretty relentless pace. (In one of those odd quirks of US television, there’s no profanity or nudity, though there’s a fair bit of gory mayhem to keep the mob happy.) The characters are all fairly well-drawn, ensuring that even a hissable villain like Big Jim has a credible point of view, and while the premise as a whole seems inevitably headed for an anticlimactic fizzle – especially if the show adheres to King’s woeful denouement – the viewer is kept so much on his toes by the show’s barmy ingenuity that the importance of a solution, any solution, seems to recede with each new episode. (This reviewer’s hope is that they end it with a puzzle, the Chester’s Mill dome vanishing just as inexplicably as it arrived; then we cut to another small town, somewhere else in the world, where a mysterious dome has just appeared out of nowhere…) Though it may not be up there with the likes of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black or Amazon’s Black Sails, Under the Dome is more than interesting enough to justify a second season. Whether it’ll deserve to last the five seasons its creators have planned is another matter, but it should be fun finding out.