“Bad news all the time?” is about as deep into the whys and wherefores of what life – imagine! – under such an Emergency might be like. “Was it always like this?” asks one of the children. The great sorrow is that Disney does not have the courage – or perhaps desire – to lean in to the potential offered by this now-prescient and fertile setup. The book was published in 2007 when this was still an imaginative tool with which to create an interesting fictional jeopardy.

Whoever is doing it is disseminating misinformation, sowing seeds of fear and distrust around the world and fomenting global chaos. Photograph: Disneyīy the end of the opening double bill, the children have been briefed on Mr Benedict’s theory that sublimated messages are being beamed from somewhere on the nearby island that houses the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened and have gone undercover as students there to investigate.

And Kristen Schaal’s innate and idiosyncratic quirkiness fits her role as Number Two in this off-kilter show with its Wes Anderson-lite beats and aesthetic, as if they were made for each other. Ryan Hurst as the devoted Milligan gets most of the best lines (at least in the first two episodes, which were all that were available for review) and captures the steadfastness beneath the weirdness. When viewers grow up to watch him as Buster Bluth in reruns of Arrested Development, their minds are going to be entirely blown. Mr Benedict, a kind of trustworthy Willy Wonka figure (though he does suffer from narcolepsy and cataplexy and is liable to pass out at moments of high tension, so you have to keep an eye on him) is played with perfectly blended verve and compassion by Tony Hale. They are all fantastically good – I still don’t know what the US puts in the water to create a new crop of devastating child actors every few years – but Kessler, in the tricky part of wordy, furious, babyish yet preternaturally adult Constance is extraordinary. The children are played by, respectively, Mystic Inscho, Emmy DeOliveira, Seth Carr and Marta Kessler.

The mysterious benedict society