Thrillers that take place in Pennsylvania seem to be a thing from over the past few years. Eastern PA was repped by Task and Mare Of Easttown. Now, with the new Apple TV thriller Nocturne, Western PA has its own creepy thriller.

NOCTURNE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In what looks like a maximum-security prison wing, two isolated inmates speak through the pipes that connect the sinks in their cells. One inmate calmly tells the other one, who is seeking advice, to bang the voices out of his head. Sure enough, the inmate runs headlong into the brick wall, killing him instantly.

The Gist: Six months later, Karl (Rory Culkin), a new nurse at Riverside Psychiatric Hospital, gets assigned to the restricted residential floor, with the most dangerous patients. The only permanent resident is serial killer Jurek Walter (Stephen Graham). He’s tricked by the warden into sedating him so a homemade weapon can be retrieved; Walter ends up giving Karl a note for his lawyer before he’s subdued.

Meanwhile, in the nearby Western Pennsylvania town of Fairhaven, a teen named Michael Frost (Landon Valentin), who went missing with his older sister three years prior, is found. Police chief Ellison (Bill Camp) is shocked, and he tells Nathan (Gary Carr), one of his detectives, to tell an FBI agent named Saga Bauer (Zazie Beetz). Bauer tells her godfather, retired detective Jonah Lynn (Liev Schreiber) about the child’s reappearance.

The Frost case is the case that has dogged Jonah, to the point where he retired after his partner — Saga’s father — killed himself. Clues that were found on Michael when he was rescued lead him and Nathan to investigate an abandoned server farm building. Evidence there leads him to think that Walter had something to do with it, despite the fact that he was at Riverside when the kids disappeared. He communicates that to Ellison and the FBI Special Agent In Charge, Alexandra Quinn (Poorna Jagannathan), who is leading the newly-formed task force to find Michael Frost’s sister. When Walter stonewalls Jonah and Quinn, however, Saga tells Jonah that she should go undercover inside the hospital to see what’s really going on with Walter.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Rowan Joffé and developed by showrunner John HlLavin from Lars Kepler’s novel Lazarus and The Sandman, Nocturne feels like it could be a spiritual cousin of Pennsylvania-based thrillers Task and Mare Of Easttown.

Our Take: Yes, we know that Nocturne takes place in Western PA while the other two shows take place in the Philly area. But Jonah’s extensive backstory — and the Delco accent that Schreiber uses — indicates that he moved to Fairhaven after a tumultuous exit from Philadelphia’s police department. The fact that he came to the small town and found that proverbial “one case that they can’t shake” is supposed to be ironic, but it just led us to be more curious about the backstory.

In fact, we were searching for backstory throughout the entire first episode. There were lots of things that were alluded to, if not downright stated, that begged for further exploration. Jonah’s father-daughter relationship with Saga, for instance, is ripe for exploration, especially after Saga tells Quinn that Jonah was more of a father to her than her biological father was. We want to know about how chasing after Walter, who seems to specialize in getting into his victims’ heads, led Jonah down such a dark hole that he had to resign.

The first episode led to a lot of questions, some that left us curious to see where the story goes, but others that just indicated our confusion about the characters’ previous history. But there’s enough that’s interesting and tense about this show that we’re hoping that most of both kinds of questions will be answered.

Performance Worth Watching: Liev Schreiber is convincing as the grouchy and troubled Jonah, but we’re also fascinated with Stephen Graham’s American-accented, soft-spoken serial killer, Jurek Walter.

Sex And Skin: We found it interesting that Saga only seems to have cropped shirts in her wardrobe, which was convenient to show one of the bruises from her most recent undercover operation.

Parting Shot: Walter hides a piece of tape he was able to grab under the rim of his cell’s toilet.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode of Nocturne left us scratching our heads about the characters’ backstories a bit, we loved the performances by Schreiber, Graham and Beetz, and want to see if our questions will be answered. [DECIDER’s Nicole Gallucci agrees! Check out her full review of Nocturne.]

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.