Dispatches From Elsewhere wants you to play more weird games with strangers

Dispatches From Elsewhere doesn’t feel like a show so much as it does a wish. A man named Peter stumbles across an elaborate game, one that instructs him to go to unusual places and do outlandish things. Answer a pay phone and dance in public until Bigfoot appears. Attend a shareholder’s meeting for a company that doesn’t exist. Unveil a conspiracy or spearhead a revolution. Despite all the strangeness, the show is very clear about what it wants to do: help you to feel connected to other people. It wants to foster empathy. Maybe, in the end, it might pull it off.

But first, the series puts you off-balance with 10 seconds of silence from Richard E. Grant, seated in an orange room, staring at the camera for that entire time. Grant plays...

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