It's worth noting that the Russo brothers (Avengers) have also already got their hands on the production rights for another of Stalenhag's works so you can't really blame me for assuming we were heading down a Marvel-esque road.
It certainly seems that way at first, with each episode following a different character in the town above "The Loop"; an underground experimenting facility responsible for all the strange happenings above ground.
But the beauty of The Loop is that its creator, Nathaniel Halpern (Legion), actively avoided focusing on the sci-fi elements or playing into a Stranger Things/Goonies-type nostalgia, and instead settled into the strange kind of realism Stalenhag originally depicted, for a staunchly character-driven series of stories.
Each story - helmed by separate directors, including Jodie Foster - contains its own kind of loop and a frankly bleak life lesson. Like the woman who finds her younger self doomed to repeat history or the boys who never learned to be happy with what they had - or to be careful what they wished for.
Then there are the generational loops; kids feeling pressured by parents who feel pressured, a cheating daughter discovering her cheating mother, children who didn't get enough love growing up who distance their own children and a boy who learns the hard way that holding on to the past can make him completely miss out on the present.
There are lessons in love, priorities, acceptance, and self-reflection, and the thing about it is there are all these mystical, magical things happening, but at the end of the day, it's still all just life. And sometimes life is a bit crap and doesn't make sense; sometimes you don't get all the answers and no amount of magic spheres or time travel can change that.
The show's aesthetics play right into that too. Tales from The Loop is visually stunning, but in a way which feels purposefully muted and melancholic. Like in Stalenhag's paintings, the landscapes are almost dauntingly expansive and the colour palettes are often dark and cold, but rather than adding a sense of foreboding or malice, it actually just feels a bit... dull - which is very much the point.
The things that happen in The Loop are part of everyday life for the people that live in that town. In much the same way we wouldn't second-guess seeing a corner dairy in a painting of small-town New Zealand, the land above the loop is dotted with abandoned "experiments".
An entire house disappears into thin air and the question is not "How did that happen?", but simply, "Where's my mum?" Likewise, a girl figures out how to stop time and doesn't question it, only what to do with the power once she has it.
It's funny because, as we trudge through lockdown, the timing of this release (it dropped on April 3) is almost wickedly perfect.
If this isn't the alternate reality we never thought we'd be living in, I don't know what is. In a matter of days, suiting up in protective gear to leave our houses and only communicating through screens became our new normal. It's funny because just like my own Tale from the Loop, I spent a lot of time thinking about how great it would be to work from home and not have to do real life for a while. Then I got what I wished for and instantly wished I hadn't, and I doubt that I'm alone in having those kinds of feelings.
The world has changed so drastically yet we've adapted to it so quickly and I think having experienced that adds an element to this show that creators were no doubt aiming to achieve, but probably wouldn't have quite reached without this timing.
That timing makes the most important part of The Loop - and one of the really impressive things about it - hit home hard, and that's how with each episode we see all the intricate ways everyone is connected and how all of our actions ripple outward.
It's summed up at the end of the series when one of the main characters, Cole, returns a book to his teacher and when she asks what he thought, he says: "It was sad. And beautiful."
And that's the show. It's also life. And that correlation is entirely the point - and one poignantly made.
